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THE LIFE AND MIND OF PAUL 

(i) 



THE 



LIFE AND MIND 
OF PAUL 



LECTURES TO THE STUDENTS OF VANDERBILT 

UNIVERSITY, DELIVERED IN MARCH, 1910 

ON THE COLE FOUNDATION 



BY 

The Rev. Alpheus W. Wilson 

Senior Bishop of the M. E. Church, South 



NASHVILLE, TENN. 

DALLAS, TEX.; RICHMOND, VA. 

PUBLISHING HOUSE OF THE M. E. CHURCH, SOUTH 

SMITH & LAMAR, AGENTS 

1912 






Copyright, 1912, 

BY 

Smith & Lamar 



©CIA330593 






<£ 



CONTENTS. 

Page 

Lecture I i 

Lecture II 18 

Lecture III 37 

Lecture IV 62 

Lecture V 85 

Lecture VI 106 

Lecture VII 130 

Lecture VIII 151 

(v) 



INTRODUCTION. 



It is safe to say that no Methodist minister has ever 
been more thoroughly saturated with the Pauline Epis- 
tles than Bishop A. W. Wilson. To use the language 
of Lord Bacon, he has literally "chewed them and in- 
wardly digested them." They have been his meditation 
day and night for more than fifty years. Whenever he 
speaks concerning them, it is with the authority of full 
and penetrating knowledge. That circumstances have 
hindered him from giving them exhaustive treatment in 
book form is a source of deepest regret to the whole 
Church. The lectures that are presented in this volume 
bear all the marks of extemporaneous delivery. They 
are simply the spontaneous outpourings of a great and 
fruitful mind, caught by a stenographer not too well 
skilled in such matters, and thus saved from passing 
into oblivion. Even so they are wonderfully rich and 
stimulating, and ought to have a wide reading. St. 
Paul is still the profoundest interpreter of the mind of 
Jesus, and anything that serves to pass on his thoughts 
to the world is a blessing of no common value. I count 
it a great honor to associate my name with that of my 
honored senior colleague by writing this brief intro- 
duction. Long may he linger among us to show us 
that it is still possible to preach the gospel with the 
Holy Ghost sent down from heaven ! E. E. Hoss. 

Nashville, Tenn., June 2J, 1912. 

(vii) 



THE LIFE AND MIND 
OF PAUL. 



LECTURE I. 

The theme, 'The Mind of Paul," . . . is a 
vast one, in some regards the vastest that could 
be suggested, not because he stands preeminently 
as the founder of our Christianity, as some higher 
critics would say, but because he is the best interpre- 
ter of the mind of the Master that we have in his- 
tory. This theme is not of my selection; it is Dr. 
Tillett's. I am simply doing what I can to adjust 
myself to his expectation and desire and to your 
need. With that understanding I take it up — the 
mind of Paul as it can be determined from his own 
utterances and the course of his life. 

You cannot judge of the mind of any man unless 
you take his whole life into account, and especially 
is this the case when you come to consider the mind 
of a man who occupied the position that Paul did 
and has exerted the influence in the world that Paul 
has. There are no accidents, there are no trivialities 
in a life like this. Everything is of moment from the 
very beginning. He himself recognized the fact that 
all the first period of his life was just as much under 
divine direction as any of its later stages. "It 

(0 



2 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

pleased God," he said, "who separated me from my 
mother's womb, and called me by his grace." It 
was not a new thing when he came upon that won- 
derful vision on the road to Damascus, but a thing 
that God had prearranged long before. 

All the various processes of training and educa- 
tion, moreover, to which he was providentially sub- 
jected were a preparation for the place he was to 
fill in the life of the world and of the Church. So 
we have necessarily to look as carefully as we can, 
within the limits allowed, at this preliminary period. 

The apostle appears to us first as the official wit- 
ness at the stoning of Stephen. They "laid down 
their garments at the feet of a young man named 
Saul." This was an expression of the real feeling 
that he had at the time, his actual mind in relation to 
Christianity ; for immediately afterwards a great per- 
secution arose against the Church which was in and 
about Jerusalem, and Saul became one of the most 
active persecutors. Laying waste the church, and 
entering into every house, he haled men and women, 
dragging them to prison, punishing them, and com- 
pelling them to blaspheme. Not satisfied with his 
work of destruction in Jerusalem, he asked letters 
from the high priests and went to other cities. It 
was on his way to Damascus, in pursuance of this 
commission, that he was arrested in his course by di- 
vine power, and the whole trend of his life was 
changed, 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 3 

When, in later years, he was a prisoner in the 
hands of the chiliarch at Jerusalem, he declared 
(with a good deal of emphasis, too) that he was a 
native of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city. He 
evidently held in high regard the place of his birth, 
and recognized the fact that he owed something to 
it. He was not the man to disregard the providen- 
tial ordering of his life. In many other respects 
also he looked back upon the scenes in his earlier ca- 
reer as having had a very vital connection with his 
whole after course as an apostle of Jesus Christ. 
You remember how, in the Epistle to the Philippians, 
he boasts of himself as "a Hebrew of the Hebrews; 
as touching the law, a Pharisee ; . . . touching 
the righteousness which is in the law, blameless." 
These things he reckoned as gain to himself, for he 
says : "But what things were gain to me, those 
I counted loss for Christ." He never repented nor 
regretted his relation to any of those things. It was 
something to him, a very great deal to him, that he 
was a native of a city like Tarsus — a city that had a 
remarkable history, into which I shall not enter, as 
you can find it in almost any of your reference books. 
But it was a very mixed city, Greek and Asiatic and 
Jewish. There he came in contact with all forms of 
life. Now and then there is an expression in his 
Epistles which indicates that he was not ignorant of 
the special characteristics that pertained to the Asi- 
atic mind; and his whole utterance shows that he 



4 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

had been thoroughly steeped in the Hellenism of 
the time — understood it well and knew how to use 
it to the advantage of the gospel. But his chief 
training was not in Tarsus. How long he remained 
there in his youth, it is impossible to tell ; but he him- 
self says that he was brought up in Jerusalem, at 
the feet of Gamaliel, which is a rather surprising 
saying. Gamaliel appears before us in one notable 
instance as an advocate of toleration. When they 
wanted to inflict the severest penalties upon the apos- 
tles for disregarding the order of the Council and 
preaching Jesus through the city, he said : "Refrain 
from these men, and let them alone : for if this coun- 
sel or this work be of men, it will come to naught" 
— you need not bother yourselves about it — "but if 
it be God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be 
found even to fight against God." Upon the further 
proceedings, however, he seemed to look with in- 
difference, and without protest allowed them to 
scourge the apostles and send them away. But he 
was evidently a mild-mannered man, and disposed 
to give some sort of freedom to the life of those 
who differed even from the essentials of the Jewish 
faith. 

But Saul of Tarsus had not learned that lesson of 
toleration from his teacher. He had no compromise 
to make with anything outside of the straitest sect 
of the law. He was a persecutor. It was in his 
blood; it was ingrained in his character. He held 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 5 

every avowal of anything that was antagonistic to 
Pharisaism, as he understood it and practiced it, to 
be blasphemy, transgressing God's law, and, if per- 
sisted in, to be punished with death. Nor did he 
hesitate to carry into practice what he thought and 
felt. When you look over his after life, it seems 
even more surprising that he should have been of 
that sort; for in the end he proved himself to be the 
most pronounced advocate of toleration and liberty 
that the world has ever known. Yet there is one 
feature of his character that comes out from the first 
and that never changed. I take it from all that he 
wrote, and from the circumstances of his early as 
well as of his later life, that he was one of the most 
intense men who ever lived. He could not hold any- 
thing indifferent. When he had what he regarded as 
truth, it was vital to him, and he meant that it should 
have its full effect upon himself and upon all upon 
whom he could bring it to bear. So when he ad- 
vocated Pharisaism as the supreme form of the 
old Jewish faith, and himself adhered to the strait- 
est sect of it, it was simply an expression of the 
very strong conviction which he cherished, that 
there was no room for anything besides that which 
he believed to be the one divine truth for men, and 
for all men. 

As a matter of course, under those conditions and 
with that attitude toward the truth, he had no inter- 
course, and could have none, with the outside Gen- 



6 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

tile world. His feeling about it was the same that he 
expressed in the first chapter of his Epistle to the 
Romans : it was a cesspool of all iniquity. The fact 
that it had departed from the one living and true 
God opened the way for corruption of every sort,. 
of the flesh and of the spirit; and his earlier expe- 
riences in the city of Tarsus, I doubt not, gave full 
confirmation to the view that he had of the hopeless- 
ness of the Gentile state and outlook. 

Peter said it was remarkable, considering he had 
lived always in Galilee, that he could say: ''Noth- 
ing common or unclean hath ever entered into 
my mouth. ,, He had been a very strict and strait 
observer of the Pharisaic law. Paul could not have 
fallen behind Peter in that respect. He was devoted 
to the Pharisaic traditions — held them with all the 
ardor of his being and conformed himself to them. 
In that attitude he appears before us — a thoroughly 
religious man after a type that our Lord had de- 
nounced most bitterly — and makes his boast of it. 
Never, in after life even, did he express any regret 
that he had been identified with it. That was not 
part of the sorrow that he felt. 

I suppose that if he had lived in the Middle Ages 
he would have been the head and front of the Inqui- 
sition. Torquemada would not have surpassed him. 
Truth, if truth at all, was the only thing for him. 
Convinced as he was of its absolute necessity for the 
salvation of men, he himself was ready to die, if 



The Life and Mind of Paul 7 

need be, and to inflict upon the opponents of what 
he regarded as truth the uttermost penalty that the 
law or custom would allow. He had been saturated 
with Pharisaic teaching; he had studied in the rab- 
binical schools ; he had associated with the men who 
were most pronounced in their adhesion to the old 
faith ; and it is not a wonderful thing, when you con- 
sider what conscience is, that he could stand before 
the Council in later years and say with all emphasis : 
"I have lived in all good conscience before God until 
this day." He included his whole life in that state- 
ment. The word itself, "I have lived," as we render 
it, means fairly, "I have lived as a citizen." But that 
with the Jew was the whole life ; for to be a Jew was 
to be a religious man and to conform to the ethical 
requirements of the Jewish law in all things. He 
held himself, then, as he wrote to the Philippians, 
"as touching the law, blameless." 

Hence I submit that here is an exceptional in- 
stance of a man. You cannot withhold your admira- 
tion from him. To what lengths he would have 
gone had he not been arrested, it is impossible to 
say; but that he would have taken high rank and 
would have pressed his advantage with the Phar- 
isees in their solidarity as a sect and in their in- 
fluence over the people to the utmost, even perhaps 
to the accomplishment of a revolution, is hardly to be 
doubted. He was not a man to rest quietly in the 
midst of the confusion and turmoil and uncertainty 



8 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of the times, and let events take their course. He 
felt that it was his business to lead the course of 
things, and to bring not only the Jewish people, but 
all others who could be brought under Jewish in- 
fluence, to the acceptance of the truth as he saw it. 

Now put to that what is perfectly manifest in all 
that he has written, that he was a man of very ex- 
traordinary genius. We are too fond of attributing 
everything in that line to special divine endowment 
for the occasion and to revelation. It is very true 
that without revelation and without the divine guid- 
ance he would not have achieved what he did. But 
inspiration is not a mechanical process. God did not 
speak into a phonograph that we might get back ex- 
actly what had been spoken. That is not God's way 
of dealing with men. When he gets hold of a man 
he takes him for what he is worth, with his own 
special qualities and endowments, quickens them 
with the revelation, and then lets the man give ut- 
terance to them according to his own ability and in- 
dividuality. 

Saul had this marvelous intellectual power. I do 
not think he was surpassed by any Writer of his own 
or of later times. The far reach of his mind was the 
most wonderful thing in all philosophies and in all 
the literature of his own or of any later age. He 
never seemed to be content with the limitations that 
were imposed upon him by the circumstances of life 
and time, always reaching after the things that were 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 9 

ahead ; and, indeed, in later life, when he exhibited 
his characteristics to their utmost, he never stopped 
until he reached the impassable line between the in- 
finite and the finite — between God and men. Words 
would fail him ; all his facility of speech counted for 
nothing. But even then he would not halt in striving 
for the unsearchable. In the ecstasy of his great en- 
deavor he cries out: "He is able to do exceeding 
abundantly above all that we ask or think. ,, Paul's 
thinking was of a broader and higher type than that 
of any other man that I have known or heard of. 
You must take that into account. I think it was 
that which specially fitted him for the work he had 
to do. But there were great contrasts. It is one of 
the wonders that a man of that type should be held 
down to the level of the cross, and that by the reve- 
lation of the cross that which was largest and broad- 
est and loftiest in his nature should first be brought 
out in its fullness. I think that if he had been put in 
the line of statesmanship simply, without any regard 
to the religious questions, he would have ranked 
among the first men of his time, perhaps outranked 
them all ; for we have in his mind, as expressed in his 
writings, an attitude not simply toward a congrega- 
tion or a Church as we hold or use the term, but to- 
ward the entire inhabited world. Whenever he was 
writing about the great things of the kingdom of 
God, he had the Roman Empire in his thought ; and 
he was planning with a view to the great achieve- 



lo The Life and Mind of Paul. 

ment — which he was not destined to see in his lifetime 
— the identification of the Roman Empire with the 
kingdom of his Lord. I have no doubt that ele- 
mental instincts of that sort manifested themselves in 
his early life. They were not the product of his con- 
version ; they were only quickened into higher activ- 
ities and broader life by that supreme transforma- 
tion. He was one of the exceptional men whom 
God finds in a dozen or two generations and uses 
for the accomplishment of unusual work that could 
not be done by any other kind of man. We have 
to consider all these things when we are seeking 
to enter into his mind. It must have been a re- 
markable progress that he made. He was a stu- 
dent of the rabbinical schools, and he writes to the 
Galatians that he profited in the Jews' religion above 
many his equals in age of his own nation. The 
meaning of it seems to be that he stood at the head 
of his class. He was far in advance of them all in 
his knowledge of the Old Testament Scriptures and 
of the rabbinical teachings, and knew how to use 
them in their application to the common life of the 
people as no other man did. You will note, too, as 
you have doubtless in the course of secular history 
noted, that when a man with such endowments, and 
with the religious element dominant in his nature, 
goes out among people and begins to work, even in 
the higher classes of life, he is likely to bring about 
a revolution and change the whole order of things. 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 1 1 

He establishes a new system, of which he himself is 
the center. In all probability there is going to be 
in the after results of such a man's life a sort of 
regeneration of society. I do not mean the word 
regeneration in its highest sense as we use it, but 
a re-creation, a re-molding, a re-formation, not a 
reformation. Paul was fitted for that sort of thing. 
No doubt he had it in mind that the prophets who 
were the immediate representatives of God the Law- 
giver, who stood at the head of Israel's great econo- 
my, and whose influence was unimpaired down to the 
very last, were the supreme representatives of the 
legal power of Jehovah himself. Paul was thor- 
oughly versed, not simply in the broad outlines of it 
all, but in the details, and kept himself in close 
touch with every advance in every line of thought 
that affected these great factors in the life of his 
people. 

We can see that clearly enough in what appears in 
his life; and it is one of the good things for us that 
no man has ever laid himself open to the world as 
Paul did, told us all about himself that could be 
told, and concealed nothing. It was his purpose to 
let everybody know just what he was from the be- 
ginning and to the end. He makes it very clear that 
even in those early days, before the touch of God 
had been realized and Christ had come into his con- 
sciousness, that he was planning for great things 
for his people. I have no doubt that in his readings 



12 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of the prophets he got some glimpses of the broader 
destiny of the people. It was impossible that a man 
of his mold, reading the glowing periods of the 
Isaian prophecies, should leave the Gentile world 
out of his account; but like the rest of the pious 
Jews, whatever may have been the special form it 
took in his mind, he evidently thought that the time 
was to come when Israel should be at the head of the 
nations, and that its dictation should be obeyed in 
all points touching morals and religion. He had a 
great destiny marked out for himself, and he had 
the forces, and he had the furniture, and he had the 
backing as far as the greatest nation that the world 
had seen up to that time could give him. He had all 
that provision and preparation made for him. 

Sometimes we think (it is our customary mode of 
thought, I believe) that when a man is converted 
there should be an immediate break between him 
and all his past life; that what has gone before 
should, in fact, be regarded as of no account. We 
read passages like the terms of the covenant, "Their 
sins and their iniquities will I remember no more," 
and "He hath separated us from them as far as the 
east is from the west," and we think that the whole 
of a man's old life is so bound up in sin and cor- 
rupted by it that it must simply be blotted out and 
never thereafter looked upon as of any moment. 
But that is to put God out of all the early stages of 
a man's life; and God is never out of any man's life 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 13 

until he assigns him his final place. From the very 
beginning he is in the life of every one of us, and we 
are bound to recognize the fact that these things are 
at least checked, regulated, ordered so as to meet 
whatever may lie in the future for man, and make it 
possible for him to answer the demand that God shall 
make upon him. So it was here. As I quoted 
awhile ago, Paul was separated to this business from 
his birth, and called by God's grace to it. He never 
forgot that he was a Jew ; never forgot that he was 
a Roman citizen ; never forgot that he was a Phar- 
isee; never forgot that he had from the very be- 
ginning pledged all the power of his being and all 
the resources at his command for the maintenance 
of what he regarded as the truth ; that he had lived 
in all good conscience before God. 

This is perhaps the most striking aspect of his 
life. It comes out more distinctly than it does in 
the life of almost any other man. He himself lays 
it bare, and for that special purpose. It was part 
of his faith in God in later years that, whenever a 
man came to love God, all things were to be made to 
"work together for good ;" and he was not going to 
leave out what might prove to be the largest part 
of the man's life, and certainly what, apart from 
revelation, was the most influential part as far as 
the normal man was concerned. For the early 
years are what make the man, after all. If he can 
be brought, while he is young, through the processes 



14 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of training that will settle him in convictions and 
in methods of thought and life that may be made 
available for the right and for the truth, you 
may pledge — I was going to say — God for the ful- 
fillment of his highest destiny. If you forget all 
this, let him shift for himself where he is subjected 
to the caprices of the society about him, without any 
definite purpose and without any settled training, 
as a matter of course you will get nothing great and 
nothing high out of him. But in cases like this 
God takes very good care that the man shall have 
the sort of training that is needed for the work which 
he is to do. He took Saul from the time that he 
was born, and saw to it that he had Tarsus — that is, 
Greek and Asiatic and Roman life — about him, with 
its idolatries in full view, that he might see all that 
there was of it in its hideousness, with its fearful 
effects in its individual and social and national life. 
Then he directed his steps to Jerusalem, that with 
his intense nature he might become identified with 
the Pharisaism of the time and illustrate it in its 
highest form, and that he might become a devotee 
of a creed and a faith that, after all, was not the 
worst thing in the world (it was the only saving 
element in the life of the world at that time) ; and 
he put him there with Gamaliel, whose counsels un- 
doubtedly must have had tremendous influence upon 
him, or he would never have referred to him as he 
did (brought up at his feet, he said). God directed 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 15 

all these things just so that this special training of 
his faculties, his sight and his insight, his social 
qualities and his religious faculty — everything that 
pertained to the normal Jew — might be put in the 
best possible position and trained to the highest 
point of power for the uses to which it should have 
to be put. And so he went through that early period. 

Paul was a Pharisee of his time, to speak of him 
even in the terms that the Lord used, and we reckon 
him by that fact; but, after all, there was a saving 
element even in Pharisaism. Our Lord's charges 
against it were traditionalism, formalism, and hy- 
pocrisy, and he drove these charges home. I think 
they refer mainly to the leaders of the party and 
to the leaders in Jerusalem more than anywhere else. 
There was a freer, wider life in Galilee than there 
was in the city of the great king. At the head- 
quarters of the faith they were rigid, uncompromis- 
ing, and unbending, and never allowed that there 
could be anything out of Pharisaism that was worth 
considering. Sadducees and Pharisees under the 
Herodian administration effected a sort of modus 
Vivendi (agreed to live together in peace) ; but the 
power, among the people, was really of the Phari- 
sees. 

I should not charge Paul with formalism or with 
hypocrisy. That would have been incompatible with 
what he said about himself and with everything we 
know about his early life. He was ready to express 



1 6 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

himself with the utmost frankness and freedom on 
all the points that concerned his faith, and he was 
ready to carry into effect openly and daringly what- 
ever he believed on all these matters. As to tra- 
ditions, I have no doubt that he held them, as all the 
Pharisees did, and came to regard them as part of 
the genuine revelation of God. Was there anything 
better than that in the way of training for such work 
as he had to do? I doubt if any of the schools 
of the world — or, if a selection could have been 
made, of university professors from all parts of the 
world, taking the best men that they could furnish — 
could have put him under a training that would more 
exactly have fitted him for what he had to do. We 
shall see something about that in later discussions. 
But the man stands before us a complete, lifelike 
figure; a Pharisee of the highest order; a young 
man furnished and equipped for any course in life 
that he might choose to pursue, with an intellect 
unsurpassed in its depth, acuteness, breadth, far 
reach, with a personal power that was not equaled 
by any among the leaders of the nation or any that 
came after him, and that put him in the forefront 
whenever and wherever he appeared. 

A young man in such conditions, with the world 
before him and with this mighty power and agency 
of God behind him ; the traditions of the centuries, 
and the revelations of prophecy, and the demonstra- 
tions of the Spirit, and the whole marvelous history 



The Life and Mind of Paul. ij 

of the people filling him and taking possession of 
him — with all these behind him and with the world 
before him, nobody can tell to what height he would 
have attained or what work he would have accom- 
plished had he remained simply Saul of Tarsus. 
But the world would have been another thing to-day. 



LECTURE II. 

I read from the book of Acts, chapter xxvi., 
verses 13-18: "At midday, O king, I saw in the way 
a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, 
shining round about me and them which journeyed 
with me. And when we were all fallen to the earth, 
I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the 
Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou 
me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.* 
And I said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I 
am Jesus whom thou persecutest. But rise, and 
stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee 
for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a wit- 
ness both of these things which thou hast seen, and 
of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; 
delivering thee from the people, and from the Gen- 
tiles, unto whom now I send thee, to open their eyes, 
and to turn them from darkness to light, and from 
the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive 

*"To kick against the pricks" refers rather to the fact that 
his life had been in direct contradiction to the divine purpose. 
He had been "separated from his mother's womb" to the one 
work, and the entire movement of his life had been in an- 
tagonism to this. In the after course of his ministry, no doubt, 
Stephen's words of wisdom and power recurred to him and 
suggested the staple of such speeches as he delivered at An- 
tioch of Pisidia. 

(18) 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 19 

forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them 
which are sanctified by faith that is in me." 

This is treated commonly as an exceptional event, 
and not to be relied upon as belonging to the normal 
course of Christian procedure. I am not so sure 
that such a view is correct. It is exceptional for the 
reason that there was an exceptional man involved ; 
but it was simply climacteric of the whole process of 
conversion in every case. Conversion must begin 
with the revelation of Jesus Christ, whether that 
revelation be made gradually or suddenly; and in 
every case it must issue, just as this has done, in an 
appreciation of Jesus Christ and absolute subjection 
to his person. You will find that in that regard the 
apostle Paul is not alone. Peter speaks with fre- 
quency and with emphasis of the revelation of Jesus 
Christ. He regards it as the supreme requirement of 
the human soul, and promises it in its fullness as the 
last result of the movement of the Christian life. 

Here it comes to a man who, as I was going to 
say, deliberately (I don't know that I ought to use 
that term) turned away from Jesus Christ. We 
shall never be able to know exactly how much about 
Christ he knew in the days before his own conver- 
sion. His life must have run alongside that of the 
Son of Man for some considerable time ; but whether 
he ever saw him in the flesh or heard words from 
his mouth at all, we cannot say. We only know that 
if he did hear him, if he did see him, he only had a 



20 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

conviction of the intense and irreconcilable antag- 
onism between his own faith and the teaching of 
Christ emphasized, accentuated in his own con- 
sciousness; and his determination to persecute the 
Church to extinction deepened. 

It is perhaps a paradoxical thing to say, and yet 
it is true, that there was but one thing in the life of 
this man up to this time with which he could be 
charged as having done wrong, and that was in his 
relation to Jesus Christ. In all other respects he was 
like the young man who came to Jesus asking what 
he should do to have eternal life. Christ's answer 
was : "Keep the commandments." "I have kept them 
all, from my youth up," was the reply. And that in- 
cluded, according to one of the evangelists, to love 
his neighbor as himself. Certainly in the after part 
of his life, when he was reviewing his early course 
and career, Paul did not hesitate to say about himself 
that, as touching the law, he was blameless. That 
was as much as could have been said of any prophet 
before his time, or of the lawgiver himself; but our 
Lord, when he taught among men, shifted the whole 
burden of responsibility from the man's relation to 
the law to his relation to himself. "If I had not 
come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin." 
"If I had not done among them the works which 
none other man did, they had not had sin: but 
now they have no cloak for their sin." The one 
thing that he regarded as essential, and the one thing 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 21 

that was to be secured by his ascension, was the gift 
of the Spirit, which should convict the world, wheth- 
er it wanted to be convicted or not, of sin, righteous- 
ness, judgment, the three great factors in human 
history and destiny — of sin, because they believe not 
in me ; of righteousness, because I go to my Father 
and they see me no more ; of judgment, because the 
Prince of this world is judged. On that side, and 
that side only (I do not hesitate to say it), this man 
was found at fault. He was as honest in his convic- 
tions as any man that ever lived. He was profoundly 
religious after the style of the highest form of re- 
ligion known to that time. He was devoted to his 
Church. His God was the God of the prophets. He 
had made no mistake in that. Jehovah, the God of 
Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob, was recognized 
by him as the supreme Lord, and was his God. He 
knew no other. Yet the moment came when, under 
the revelation made to him from another sphere of 
things, not from the heart of Judaism, not from any 
of the rabbinical schools, not from his researches 
into the old prophetic sayings (afterwards he used 
them, the very sayings that were applied to his Mas- 
ter as applicable to his own life and work) — not 
from any of these, but directly out from the mid- 
heaven, amidst the splendor of a light above the 
brightness of the Syrian sun at midday (and nobody 
knows what that is who has not traveled under that 
sky and felt the power of that sun as it blazed down 



22 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

upon the white sands), and under its shock, he fell 
to the earth. While thus humiliated and broken 
down in the utter feebleness of his humanity, there 
came to him that word from heaven in the old, fa- 
miliar, sacred dialect: "Saul, why persecutest thou 
me?" 

I suppose no man ever received a more tremen- 
dous shock — persecuting the splendors of the heav- 
enly life, persecuting the Utterer of words whose 
tones are as thunders of God, mightier than the still, 
small voice of the prophet, that reach the inner 
chambers of consciousness and compel the attention 
of the man. Persecuting! "Who art thou?" "lam 
Jesus." That was all. That was all he needed. If 
that was Jesus, most assuredly this whole course of 
his had been utterly and hopelessly wrong. No use 
to talk about how conscientious he had been. It was 
not worth while to tell him that he had relied upon 
the experience and testimony and teachings of the 
old, thoroughly religious party still existing among 
the chosen people. It was not worth while to remind 
him that with all sincerity he had searched the Scrip- 
tures of God and had tried to find out the truth, and 
had come to the truth that this Nazarene was a 
Christ who had threatened the destruction of the na- 
tion. As to that, he stood just where Caiaphas the 
high priest did. It was not worth while to tell him 
of that. The only supreme fact now was that this 
revelation from the eternal Lord was a disclosure of 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 23 

the whole work of his past life. Stephen's death 
was a murder, in which he was a participant ; haling 
men and women from their homes to prison and 
death was an outrage upon God as well as upon hu- 
manity ; and his commission from the chief priest to 
go into foreign cities and find men and women 
there and bring them down to Jerusalem, that under 
cover of the law they might be punished — all that 
was simply an infamy not to be condoned, only to 
be repented of. Certainly conscience was involved 
in it. "I verily thought I ought to do many things 
contrary to this Jesus of Nazareth." Honesty of 
purpose! "I have lived," he says years after, "in 
all good conscience, not in your sight simply, but 
before God. I have never violated a known law. 
I have never departed from any path of rectitude 
that was made plain before me. I have done my ut- 
most to comply with every requirement of God." 
What more did the Master need? Only the one 
thing needful. But, mind you, a man of that sort, 
with rooted convictions, and with a cultivated con- 
science, and with extraordinary endowments by na- 
ture as well as by training, and with all the advan- 
tages that he had had of association with the highest 
and best of his people, whom he would be bound to 
condemn by this new life — a man like that can be 
moved only by just such a revelation as was made to 
him. You might have preached to him until the day 
of his death with the eloquence of Apollos, with the 



24 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

intense feeling of Peter, and with the gentleness and 
deep insight of the apostle John. It would have had 
no influence upon him. He would have cried out in 
regard to each one of them, "The man is not fit to 
live," as the mob afterwards cried about him. 
Nothing of that sort would have affected him. It 
must be a revelation, clear-cut, coming right out of 
the heart of the heavens, from the very presence of 
the throne. Paul stood head and shoulders in all his 
intellectual and spiritual capabilities above all the 
men of his time, however they may have been 
trained ; and standing there as he did, with his view 
of all that lay below him, nothing but the reach from 
above could have touched him and made him feel 
that his life must be radically changed. That was 
what came to him. 

Men say he was prepared for it by other things. 
You could not prepare a man of that sort. They 
say his conscience was pricking him about Stephen's 
death, that the echo' of Stephen's word he heard in 
his own ministerings, and he was gradually being 
brought to the point of full preparation for such a 
revelation. He never hints at that. He says em- 
phatically that he thought he ought to do these things 
against Jesus of Nazareth. And when Luke re- 
viewed his course, he did not intimate that there was 
a solitary doubt in the mind of the apostle or the 
faintest suspicion that he might be wrong; but en- 
raged — "exceedingly mad against them" are his 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 25 

words. In such a state of mind as that, doubt was 
impossible and regret could not have entered. Mad- 
dened against them, he delivered them to prison, and 
with threatening and slaughter he went forth on his 
mission of persecution and extinction. There was no 
hesitancy on his part and no questioning as to the 
right of his course ; and it took more than an apostolic 
vision, more than the persuasive power of eloquence, 
and more than the appeal to the word spoken by 
prophet and lawgiver — more than could ever be fur- 
nished on earth. It took the voice from heaven to 
move him, and you will find that confirmed in one 
striking feature of the man's life. From that time 
on he paid very little attention, as far as matters of 
this sort were concerned, to anything that went on 
about him. He didn't ask Peter for his experience, 
and glean something from it to help him on. He 
was three years in Arabia in converse with his Lord, 
getting all he could from him by revelation, and in no 
other way. He didn't take up the great facts of 
Christian history and deduce from them the lessons 
of life that we are so fond of using and applying in 
our time. Nothing of that sort. He drew out of 
his own personal experience and out of his immedi- 
ate discernments of the unseen and eternal things. 
He himself said that he looked not at the things 
which were seen, but at the things which were not 
seen. He did not go back even to his Lord's life. 
He never refers to a miracle of his except the resur- 



26 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

rection, and that was involved in the revelation he 
had. He never touches any of the marvelous lines 
of his teachings or uses them as his text. Once 
there is a citation of a word of Christ that is re- 
corded nowhere else, which he gives to the elders of 
Ephesus at Miletus. But for all that belonged to his 
own personal experience, for all the range of truth 
which he taught in his Epistles, and for everything 
that pertained to the welfare of the Church of God, 
he looked out yonder. O, this vision opened the 
heavens to him, and they were never closed! You 
may shut him up anywhere in the dungeon ; you may 
toss him over the raging seas of the Adriatic ; you 
may fling him in the midst of the maddened mob at 
Lystra; you may do what you like as to the flesh, 
but his eyes are open and he sees and knows and is 
satisfied, and nothing else would ever have satisfied 
him. 

As I said, if it was an exceptional revelation, it 
was because the man was exceptional; for I know 
nothing like him in history, apostolic or other. The 
other apostles were brought by gradual process of 
training by the Lord himself, by the Lord incarnate, 
to their belief in his person. They stood with him on 
the Jordan when John baptized him; they heard 
John's testimony to him; they followed him that 
afternoon, and spent the evening with him and lis- 
tened to his wonderful voice, the charm of which 
never left them; they trudged with him along the 



The Life and Mind of Paid. 2J 

ways of Galilee and Judea ; they watched him, a weary 
and wayworn Man; and as wonder after wonder in 
his person, life, utterances, and work disclosed itself 
to them, they began to get some glimmering of what 
he was, until the searching question came when they 
were withdrawn from the great multitude with all 
its excitements: "Who say ye that I am?" Then 
Peter answered : "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
living God." He really did not know what his own 
answer included ; for directly afterwards he tried to 
restrain the Lord from the offering of himself, which 
he himself said was essential to the maintenance of 
his character and the fulfillment of his work as "the 
Christ, the Son of the living God." They went wear- 
ily after him, and became despairing when that trag- 
edy of the universe, the sign of life for the world, the 
cross, was uplifted before them. They turned away 
hopeless from the sight, and it was hard to bring them 
to the conception, to the realization, of his new life 
when he came in his risen form and stood among 
them; and then, after all that, it required the bap- 
tism from on high to work within them the complete 
and final conviction that this Jesus, but man still, God 
has exalted to his right hand to be a Prince and a 
Saviour. Paul never went through all that. I do 
not think he needed to go through it. He had a 
struggle, undoubtedly. When he had seen that vi- 
ion, the first thing that must come to his mind was, 
How shall I reconcile that with Calvary ? How is it 



28 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

that he who sits on the throne is the same who hung 
there tortured, bleeding, agonizing, dying ? How is 
it that he sitting there is the same who was laid in a 
human tomb, wrapped in the graveclothes that men 
should furnish, waiting there at the mercy of mere 
men until God should bid him rise? How did that 
happen ? was the question with him. He had to rec- 
oncile these two tremendous facts in his personal ex- 
perience. He knew that the Jesus whom he had per- 
secuted had been crucified. He knew that Jesus the 
Nazarene sat on ■ the throne at the right hand of God. 
How do you put them together ? He knew that Jesus 
carried the cross up there. For three years in the 
Desert of Arabia undoubtedly he struggled with that 
question until he brought out those magnificent ex- 
pressions on the meaning of it all, which his own ex- 
periences and the revelation of the Son of God had 
taught him for the world's behalf. O, men are 
trying to set it aside now, and think they know more 
about it than this man did, and that we can get wiser 
theories and deeper insight into God's ways than 
he had because he lived so long ago. O, sir, when 
you stand on the mount of visions, and look through 
the rifted heavens, and see the splendors of the 
throne, and hear the voice of the risen Son of God, 
we shall give heed to -your new notions, and not until 
then. We will take Paul as he stands as the best rep- 
resentative and expression of the grand, fundamental 
fact that Christ died and rose from the dead, and that 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 29 

he ever sitteth at the right hand of the Majesty in 
heaven as our Lord and our Saviour. 

You will note another thing about this : it is not 
the man simply and only, but it is the man whom God 
has chosen for specific work, and all of whose train- 
ing up to that time had been directed to that end. 
He himself said that God separated him from his 
mother's womb to this end, and that meant that the 
whole direction of his life had been under the re- 
straining and controlling hand of God. It was a ne- 
cessity that he should see and understand sin. He 
never would have known what the cross meant but 
for that. It was a necessity that he should come into 
some of those difficulties and roughnesses and, I 
may say, crudenesses of Pharisaic life. They were 
the things that polished the man and trained him. 
There never was a man who went out into the apos- 
tolic or any other ministerial life who was so thor- 
oughly prepared by the whole course of training he 
had received for the special work that he had to do. 

We take, for example, the character and mission 
of Peter. It was his privilege to open the door of 
faith to the Gentiles, and he did it when he admitted 
Cornelius. Yet called as he was to this high service, 
had it not been for the special revelation of that 
hour and the compulsion laid upon him, he never 
would have preached to Cornelius; and if he had 
not been brought by that compulsion into a compre- 
hension of a larger life for the gospel than he had 



30 The Life and Mind of Paul 

anticipated or wanted, he would not have stood up 
in the Council at Jerusalem and vindicated Paul's 
course of freedom for the Gentile Church. He re- 
ceded from it as far as he dared when he was with 
Paul at Antioch afterwards, and he stood for him 
in the Council simply because the requirement was 
upon him. He had been chosen to give the gospel to 
the Gentiles, and he could not by any act of his take 
it back again. Paul did not give it to the Gentiles in 
the first instance, but he was the only man of the 
whole apostolic college who was fit to make it the 
world-wide message of Christ. To give the gospel 
to the Gentiles — he felt that to be his mission. Now, 
that is not conjecture; it is just what is said here 
by the Lord : "I have appeared unto thee for this 
purpose, to make thee a minister [an official minister, 
that word means] and a witness both of these things 
which thou hast seen, and of those things in the 
which I will appear unto thee ; delivering thee from 
the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I 
send thee." It required special fitness and training 
for that sort of a thing. Any one of the apostles 
could have been an apostle to the circumcision, and 
Paul as well as any of them, or better, perhaps. If 
he had confined his activities to the Jewish circle of 
life, they would not have persecuted him in Jerusa- 
lem ; they would not have hounded him to his death. 
They would have let him go on preaching Christ, say- 
ing: "That is the sort of Christianity we want to 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 31 

graft on Judaism. We are willing to take that sup- 
plement to it." But Paul was not that sort of a man. 
When he saw that vision and heard that voice, he 
became conscious immediately that the world's re- 
strictions must be thrown off. The man Jesus, sitting 
up there, is not going to be bound by Pharisaical lim- 
itations nor by Jewish demands. He is the Lord of 
the whole earth, and there is not a people or nation 
or family anywhere that is not entitled to some share 
in this magnificent revelation that has come to him. 
"I have appeared to thee." For this purpose the 
word comes to him. "I have not simply sent a mes- 
sage ; I have not taught you through other apostles. 
I intend that you shall have such burden upon you as 
you can get only by your immediate intercourse with 
myself. You must know me as I am before you can 
speak out this word in all its breadth and in all its 
fullness of requirement and application." 

So Jesus appears to him. Nothing less than that 
would have sufficed for such a work. For, as I 
told some of you yesterday, this man was not simply 
an ordinary circuit preacher going about to deliver 
his message with reference to the salvation of a sin- 
gle soul here and there, or of a community here and 
there, but he had the Roman Empire in his view and 
the world-wide gospel before him. He was a states- 
man of the kingdom of heaven. He wrote out its 
constitution, inaugurated all its sessions, and or- 
ganized it upon the basis of eternal things — the basis 



$2 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of Jesus Christ risen from the dead and ruling 
from the throne. It was this breadth of mind and 
character of the man that set him out as the spe- 
cial agent of God for this peculiar work, the work 
which he only of all that apostolic college could have 
done. Others came in where he had labored and 
carried on the work, watering where he had planted, 
teaching where he had given the rudiments. But he 
went where no other man had laid a foundation. 
He was not going to build upon other men's founda- 
tions; he intended to do his own specific work just 
where it had not been done by anybody else. And 
when it came to the critical period and purpose of his 
life, he must go to Rome, not because the gospel had 
not reached there (the laymen of the Church had 
carried it there long before), but he must go there 
because that was the heart and head of heathendom, 
of the Gentile world. When he writes to Timothy 
about his appearance in the Imperial City, he says : 
"Everybody forsook me. I stood alone. But the 
Lord stood by me, and strengthened me, so that the 
gospel was fully preached, and all the Gentiles [tre- 
mendous word!] could hear." All the Gentiles! 
And he uses that bold expression, that marvelous 
figure in the fifteenth chapter of Romans, where he 
tells of himself as ministering priest, ministering the 
gospel to the Gentiles, that the offering up of the Gen- 
tiles might be acceptable to God. As the priest he 
takes the whole Gentile world in his arms and offers 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 33 

it up to God. Who else could have done it ? and how- 
could he have done it unless he had had such a reve- 
lation as this ? 

Later in the history of the Church, Paul was set 
aside largely. His freedom and his religious ex- 
perience were not compatible with the domination 
that Rome intended to establish over the conscience 
and the life of man, and it could not afford to make 
his testimony the finality for the Christian Church 
and the Christian world. There was one man over 
yonder on the shores of Africa who saw more pro- 
foundly into his meaning and worth than any of 
them, and Augustine became in a large sense the 
special representative of Paul in Christianity. But 
Rome made Augustine a saint, and paid no further 
heed to him. His teaching was not embodied in the 
theology of Rome, nor is any of it incorporated in 
the Romish creed. The Jansenists took it up, and 
would have followed it to its logical conclusion; but 
they were persecuted by the Church and destroyed. 
It was not until the Reformation came and broke 
the way for release from the shackles of Romanism, 
and men began to look to the true source of life and 
to lift their eyes for the vision of the Son of God, and 
bent their ears to hear his proclamation of love and 
liberty to the captives, and refused to let go the 
liberty wherewith Christ had made them free — it 
was not until those later days that . Paul took his 
rightful place in the world. And to-day he stands out 
3 



34 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

as the nearest approach to the mind of his Lord, the 
best exposition of his meaning in the cross and in 
the resurrection, and the only organizer of the spir- 
itual life and the doctrinal truth of the Church. 
He can be depended upon to omit nothing and to add 
nothing. The freest man, after that moment, of his 
day, the man charged with the heaviest responsi- 
bilities, and the man who pronounced himself the 
slave of Jesus Christ, not of the apostles, by him 
alone to be ordered — no authority on earth can say 
what he shall do and what he shall say; but any 
whisper that comes from the throne he will give 
heed to, and any service demanded from the throne 
he will perform, no matter what it costs. 

Take these things all together now. Here is his 
personal experience — such an experience as, I dare 
say, no other man in Christian history has gained, 
but such an experience as no other man in Christian 
history was fitted for and that no other man in Chris- 
tian history needed for the purpose for which God 
wanted to use him. This man required it. Nothing 
else would have saved him. His work demanded it. 
He could not have the impetus or the wisdom and 
the breadth for his work without it, and it was this 
that set him apart emphatically, as all the other 
apostles confess, the apostle to the nations. You can 
read it all in this light. He was not simply converted 
at the moment when that flash came upon him. That 
was personal, individual, profound, thorough. But 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 33 

he was made, sealed, ordained an apostle of Jesus 
Christ at that same moment; had been separated to 
it long before. But now the final sealing comes, and 
all the energy and intentness of the man's nature, 
all this marvelous training by which he could di- 
rect every faculty in the way it must go to reach the 
goal that he had in view, all this experience of the 
past which disclosed to him so fully the points of 
power and the points of weakness in the path that 
he had left — all this, gathered up in his person, was 
now to be turned to use for this newly discovered 
Lord. Out upon the old Pharisaism ! "O my peo- 
ple, my heart's desire and prayer to God for you is 
that you may be saved ! You have a zeal of God, 
but not according to knowledge. Henceforth if you 
will not give heed to me, I will turn to the Gentiles 
with a bleeding heart, with streaming eyes, and 
trembling in every limb with weakness and fear, 
turned away from the home that I love, the people 
I have cherished, and give myself to the world out- 
side, this vast Gentile world. There are possibilities 
for Christ there that I cannot realize at home, and 
he must be glorified and magnified. For me to live 
is Christ. O, I am ready to die for his name any- 
where and at any time!" He does not say, "For 
me to live is to live a Christian life," but, "For me to 
live is Christ." (He never uses "Christian." The 
name was given at Antioch, because, I suppose, he 
had been preaching Christ as nobody else had done. 



36 The Life and Mind of Paul 

He never uses that word, but says "Christ." He 
identifies himself with Christ.) "The mystery of 
Christ is in you. I know Christ and his resurrec- 
tion and the fellowship of his suffering. Christ is 
all in all." And Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, 
henceforth has ho mind but that of Christ. "I am 
crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet not I, 
but Christ liveth in me : and the life which I now live 
in the flesh [this outer life of earthly relation and 
labor] I live by the faith of the Son of God, not my 
own; Christ lives in me, and it is his — the faith of 
the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for 



LECTURE III. 

It is a matter of prime importance to us to know- 
just what effect the revelation which had come to 
Paul had upon his relation to the world, to the Jew 
first and to the Gentile next. Naturally our sup- 
position is that there would be a radical change; 
you might call it an alienation of the man from his 
old associations. He had entered upon a new line 
of life between which and the Jews there had been 
exhibited antagonism of the most pronounced and 
apparently irreconcilable type. It is true that a 
great many of the Jews — at one place in the Acts it 
is said myriads of them — had been converted to the 
faith of Christ, but they were what have been called 
Jewish Christians. They held to the law and to the 
necessity of the maintenance of the law in order to 
obtain salvation, and never reached the point that 
Paul attained at the very outset, that Christ alone 
was sufficient ; that he was not to be regarded simply 
as a supplement to the law, not merely as a fulfill- 
ment of prophecy for the Jewish race, but that he 
was to be all and in all to Jew as well as to Gentile. 

We understand from our scripture, our New Tes- 
tament scripture particularly, that in the Jewish es- 
timate there were but two classes of people, the 
Jews and the Gentiles. They made no distinction 

(37) 



38 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

between the various orders of Gentile life as far as 
the fundamental characteristics were concerned. Of 
course there were some among the freer order of 
Jews who appreciated what was best in the Hellenic 
life and culture, who knew something of the Grecian 
philosophers, and were ready to avail themselves of 
a somewhat larger intercourse with the outside 
world than was admissible to the strictest sects of the 
Pharisees. But as a class the Jews held themselves 
absolutely aloof, and all the rest of the world was 
under God's ban. They might possibly find deliv- 
erance if they would become in a sense Jews, prose- 
lytes, outer court worshipers; but they never could 
have been so identified with the Jewish people that 
they could be partakers in full of the inheritance 
which God had promised to be the portion of the 
children of Israel. Paul in his early days was in full 
sympathy with that Jewish attitude and thought; 
he had no sympathy with Gentilism in any form. 
It is not much to be wondered at when we recall 
the common life of the heathenism at that time, 
the idolatry and the viciousness that was the inev- 
itable result of idolatry everywhere, even among the 
most highly cultured and the best-thinking men of 
the times. And he held in his early days, as all the 
rest of the Jews did, that they were the sole pos- 
sessors of the truth of God, and that they alone had 
the right of access to communion with God. 

We must not forget that, in a sense, they were 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 39 

right. Our Lord himself, talking with the Samari- 
tan woman, gave this intimation of the fact. He 
taught her: "We" Jews "know what we worship ;" 
"you" Samaritans (and they were better than the 
common run of Gentiles) "worship you know not 
what." And, further, he adds emphatically : "Salva- 
tion is of the Jews." So we cannot set aside their 
claim as a mere idle boast and a matter of self-con- 
ceit. They had a tremendous history behind them to 
back up their claim. They traced their course of life 
to men who were preeminent in the world's history, 
not in the way that the philosophers of Greece and 
the warriors of Rome and the builders of those old 
civilizations were, but they were preeminent in their 
conception of God and in their understanding of 
what the knowledge of God required of men. Abra- 
ham, most majestic figure of the old patriarchal time, 
a prophetic power in the race; David, whose lofty 
flights of song touched nearer to the celestial airs 
than any ever sung, whose rapt utterances have been 
repeated through the ages ever since and have be- 
come household words and cherished expressions of 
the Church of God ; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel — there 
are none in any race to compare with men like these ; 
there are none who have left their imprint upon 
the generations to follow as they have done; there 
are none besides whose moral quality stands out 
as a sort of heroic element, battling with the cor- 
ruptions and vices of the world and giving the 



40 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

full promise, in the midst of the ruin that had been 
wrought by sin, that there would be redemption for 
the race or for any part of it. The Jew held that 
these belonged to him. They were of his nation, of 
his tribe, of his family. It was a household of 
saints; and they claimed that to these and such as 
these, as the representatives and leaders of Judaism, 
Jehovah, the only living and true God, made himself 
known as he did not to any others. Perversions and 
errors and blunders and evils of the grossest form 
had sprung up in the course of their history. They 
had even degenerated into idolatry. The curious 
thing is that while they claimed the right to enter 
with the nations about them into the worship of false 
gods, they never allowed themselves to be utterly cut 
off from the worship of Jehovah. They mingled the 
two. The altars of the false gods of the surrounding 
nations at various periods of their history were built 
in the sacred place — the temple of the gods alongside 
of the altar of Jehovah. But when you talked to the 
Jew or inquired into his mind in regard to these 
things, he would invariably (he might have been a 
vicious man and might have been an idolater) tell 
you that Jehovah had entered into covenant with 
his people, and, whatever they might do, as long 
as they recognized Jehovah at all they were en- 
titled to all the benefits of that covenant. It got 
to be in the course of time a stupid sort of faith, a 
blind, dead thing. They forfeited the vital elements 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 41 

in it by their obtuseness and their failure to recog- 
nize what lay back of all this provision and ar- 
rangement for their benefit. They became a wood- 
en, insensate people, and in the time of our Lord 
his charges against them were not only perfectly 
true as he made them, but they were so preeminently 
true that the name of God was blasphemed among 
the Gentiles because of them. Yet they were the 
only people on earth that kept the name and the 
quality of the eternal God in actual thought and life 
among them. They were widely separated by that 
fact from all other nations of the earth. You might 
turn to the most cultured nations of antiquity, and 
just at the point of highest culture they developed 
the greatest corruption; and their culture could not 
and did not save them. They had no God. The 
nearest approach that they could come to it was 
that mysterious altar inscribed to an unknown god, 
which Paul saw in Athens ; and outside of that there 
was hardly a hint anywhere that there was recogni- 
tion of the living and the true God. There may be 
exceptions, of which we shall speak by and by ; but 
it is true of the great body of the Gentile world, 
and the Jews could rightfully claim that they were 
the sole keepers of the supreme truth of the only 
God. It was written in the forefront of the only 
ethical law that was ever promulgated authoritative- 
ly and officially. It was inscribed upon their altars. 
It was branded upon them by the fact of circum- 



42 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

cision as a necessity of the household and of the in- 
dividual life, and it met them at every turn of their 
history. They were compelled to recognize the mar- 
velous opportunities that had been given them and 
which were the revelations to them of the pres- 
ence and working of the only living and true God 
among them ; and in those respects they show to the 
world a history such as no other people, no other 
family upon the face of the earth, could exhibit. 

The Babylonian captivity intensified all this feel- 
ing and led to a series of endeavors to form rules 
that should crystallize the morality that was based 
upon the existence and rule of the only God, for the 
benefit of all the people in all their relations in life, 
even the most minute. Thence came a system of 
casuistry elaborated in the rabbinical schools, upon 
which they .exhausted their intellectual forces and 
wasted away their spiritual energy, and that became 
the representation of the Jewish life in the time of 
our Lord and of the apostle Paul. He said of them, 
as you remember, in the Epistle to the Romans: "I 
bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but 
not according to knowledge." They had lost the 
old faith in the living Jehovah, had substituted for 
it a mechanical conception of God, and had for- 
feited their true relation with God by virtue of their 
substitution of these subtleties of the human intellect 
for the old and legal truths of the Mosaic institute. 
That was, in brief (we cannot go into details in a 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 43 

matter of that sort now), how the case stood when 
this marvelous change took place in the mind and 
character and life of the apostle Paul. He had 
been identified with the Jew in his understanding 
and his aims and his expectations. He was, per- 
haps, a more honest man than most of them. The 
terms that our Lord applied to the great body of 
Pharisees could not certainly have been applicable to 
him. He could never have used the words about 
himself that he did had it been so. But at the very 
point where his Jewish character comes to its climax 
and asserts itself with the most pronounced empha- 
sis in his persecution of this sect that had come out 
of Judaism and was yet, as he felt and saw, antag- 
onistic to Judaism the old faith loses its hold upon 
him. There is a new revelation, and he comes to a 
conception of God, mediated through Jesus Christ, 
which was altogether foreign to every notion of re- 
ligion and of the religious life that was held by the 
old teachers and by all the people, Sadducees as well 
as Pharisees. The break was complete, and there 
could be no reconciliation between them. 

What effect was that to have upon his relation to 
his people? You must remember, in the first place, 
that he never changed his attitude toward the law. 
It was ever with him, to the very last, a divine law. 
It was holy, it was good, it was spiritual. It had the 
highest qualities that attached to any creed, or could 
attach to any creed, among them. It was not a mere 



44 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

evolution from the conditions and through the proc- 
esses of ordinary human history ; to the last he held 
it to be God's gift to the people. It was not a prod- 
uct of the wisdom of the ages; it started before the 
ages had begun to run their course, and at the very 
outset it was God's predetermined way for the life 
of them that believed in him and expected to gain the 
benefit that was to be realized through fellowship 
with him. To the very last the old mystic insight 
and prophetic anticipations and revelations, and the 
marvelous events in the history of the nation, were 
definite and real things in his estimate; and in that 
sense he never ceased to be a Jew. He did not even 
throw off the observance of the Jewish ritual. It 
was perfectly clear to him (as a matter of course 
he could not have failed to see it) that in the process 
of time it would decay and vanish away; but he held 
that every man that was circumcised was bound to 
keep the whole law. He was never charged with 
any violation of it except by false witnesses when 
they wanted to find occasion of offense and bring 
him before the Roman governor. His brethren of 
the Council at Jerusalem said to him very frankly: 
"These Jews say you have apostatized and live as 
the Gentiles do. We know it is otherwise. If you 
will follow the course we indicate, they will learn that 
you are still a Jew who observes the law as faithfully 
as they do." And he didn't question it ; he admitted 
the fact. I suppose that up to the day of his death, 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 43 

as far as it was possible, in all his wanderings and 
amidst the calamitous conditions of his life, he 
maintained his old habits of service and ritual ob- 
servance, so that he stands to the last as a Jew. Nor 
did he underestimate his people in their relation to 
the new form of life that he expected to prevail in 
the world. "What advantage then hath the Jew? 
. . . Much every way : chiefly, because that unto 
them were committed [unaltered] the oracles of 
God." They are the depositaries of the authorita- 
tive utterances of divine truth, and to them alone we 
must look for whatever record of God's will is left 
among men. That is their privilege, their preroga- 
tive, and that is their duty and their responsibility. 
When he expands upon the same theme afterwards, 
in his intense desire to show his estimate of his own 
brethren, he says: "To whom pertaineth the adop- 
tion, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving 
of the law, and the service of God, and the promises ; 
whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning 
the flesh Christ came." He was never ashamed that 
he was a Jew. He regarded it as the prerogative of 
his life that he was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and he 
proclaimed the fact. You will find it in almost every 
letter that he wrote. He insisted that he was iden- 
tified with his people of Israel, and that in all the 
course he pursued he was simply carrying out the 
purpose which God had in view through this his 
chosen people. 



46 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

"Now this I say," he wrote, "that Christ is the 
minister of the circumcision." He felt that he be- 
longed to that class. First of all, the minister to 
them, "to confirm the promises made unto the fa- 
thers;" but he added to it the sequel that the Jews 
had lost sight of : "And that the Gentiles might glo- 
rify God for his mercy." The Jews were the first 
recipients of his divine bounty; but it was the pur- 
pose of God, even in his original word to Abraham, 
that all the families of the earth, through him, should 
be blessed and made partakers of these benefits. So 
you have to look at him in that light. He was a 
Jew, and what of experience he had on his way to 
the higher life he himself depicts under Jewish 
forms in that marvelous seventh chapter of the Epis- 
tle to the Romans. He tells you there how the law 
had come to him. It is the very word, the com- 
mandment of God, which stirred in him elements of 
his spiritual life and made him conscious of the fact 
that somehow he had gone away from God and lost 
his hold upon the diviner things of life. He sought 
to recover himself by the process of law, and found 
that it was impracticable and impossible. By the 
works of the law, he realized in his own personal 
experience, no flesh can be saved; and he brought 
out from the old order of procedure, under the re- 
quirement of law, and demonstrated from his own 
effort and in the course of his own struggling, the 
futility of any legal process. He realized in his 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 47 

personal experience the great fact that the law, mag- 
nificent as it was as a revealer of God's ethical na- 
ture and as disclosing the need of man and showing 
his guilt, and great as it was as the educator of the 
people, was yet absolutely unable to accomplish the 
only thing that God wanted and that God must have 
from his people. The law could not save him. That 
was his own experience as a Jew. I will stop just a 
moment to say that, as a matter of fact, Paul never 
drew on anybody else's experience. It wasn't what 
anybody else told him that he told the world ; it was 
what he had found out for himself by his individual 
and personal tests and trials of the things which he 
proclaimed. It was so here. He knew what the 
law was, what it could do, what it could not do, be- 
cause he had gone through the whole process of legal 
training and of legal endeavor. And yet, after all 
this, while he saw the failure and proclaimed the 
utter futility of any legal proceedings to secure the 
end in view, he gladly, with a sort of exaltation in 
spirit, declared himself still a Jew, a Hebrew of the 
Hebrews. 

In his personal relations the case assumed another 
aspect. He was perfectly willing to remain in the 
closest fellowship with his brethren of the old faith. 
He never broke with them; they broke with him. 
He wanted to be identified with them, and the Lord 
appeared to him and told him he must get out of 
Jerusalem. He argued the case — argued it with his 



48 The Life and Mind of Paul 

Lord and Master. He told him : "They know what 
I have done. They are perfectly excusable. I was 
as bitter as any of them I persecuted this way to 
the death. I dragged women as well as men to pris- 
on. I have done the very things that they are doing 
now. Let me stay here and see if I cannot bring 
them to my point of view." "No ; they will not hear 
thy testimony. Get thee out. I will send thee far 
hence to the Gentiles." To any other man among 
the Jews, perhaps, that would have been a sentence 
of doom. I doubt — while I do not depreciate any of 
them, but recognize the world's indebtedness to 
them — I doubt if there was one among the apostles 
save Paul himself who would have received with a 
quiet mind and with a steadfast faith an order of 
this kind: to get away from the chosen people and 
give life and labor to the Gentiles, quit the highest 
reigning order of God's aristocracy, and go down to 
the dogs; to go away from the pure atmosphere of 
Jehovah's presence and Jehovah's life, and mingle 
with the foul and corrupt multitude that thronged 
the courts of vice which they called the temples of 
their gods; to turn to such a life as this from the 
old loved Jewish associations. I say I doubt radical- 
ly if any other man could have received a command 
of that sort and have readily and gladly given obe- 
dience to it. And you will note another thing about 
him — that he takes care, wherever he goes, first of 
all, to labor strenuously for the recovery of Judaism 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 49 

from its blindness, and to bring the Jewish people to 
the recognition of the truth as it is in Jesus. He 
went to the synagogues and proclaimed the word 
of God first to the Jews ; and it was only when he 
said to those at Antioch, "Ye count yourselves un- 
worthy of eternal life," that he turned to the Gen- 
tiles. 

Of course all this had its effect upon the mind and 
thought, as well as upon the outward life, of Paul. 
He could never shake off the influences that had con- 
trolled him in his earlier days, and, indeed, he did 
not wish to do so. They were factors in his work 
and in the whole course of his life. He could not 
have been the apostle to the Gentiles if he had not 
been in the first instance such a radical, whole-heart- 
ed Jew; for it was precisely those qualities which 
made the Jew prominent, and shut him off from the 
rest of the world, that were needed for the demon- 
stration of the truth in the broader life of the Gen- 
tiles. This, of course, does not mean that he in- 
tended to incorporate Jewish methods of thought 
and of life into the Gentile system. Far from 
it. As far as that was concerned, he had been made 
free, and with a freedom which he fully appreciated 
and would not surrender at anybody's bidding. But, 
nevertheless, that intenseness of faith, that reverence 
for the old Scriptures, that regard for the ethical 
law, that single and sole recognition of Jehovah as 
the only living and true God that stamped the Jew- 
4 



50 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

ish character and made it what it was in the estima- 
tion of the world were the dominant features in 
his own character. It was a long time before the 
Gentile world could distinguish between the Jew and 
the Christian. They thought this was only another 
sect of Judaism, and that it would be swallowed up 
in the great mass of that faith. While, therefore, 
they persecuted one, they persecuted the other. But 
the Jewish element in Paul's life and in Paul's writ- 
ings stands out distinctly, not as an incident, not as 
an unnecessary feature, but as essential to the prose- 
cution of his work. The old Jewish arguments were 
the arguments by which men, after all, were to be 
brought to God. I do not mean the rabbinical argu- 
ments ; I mean the arguments he got out of law and 
prophecy. He was pleading both to them continu- 
ously. The recorded speech, which was so much aft- 
er the line of Stephen's speech before the Council, is 
simply a record of Jewish history and a declaration 
of the effect that ought to be realized from that 
whole course of providential dealing with Israel. 
Just as Peter, when he preached to Cornelius, did 
not take up the elements of Roman teachings and the 
Gentile philosophies and the arguments that might 
have availed with cultivated Gentiles; but he said, 
"The word which God sent to the children of Is- 
rael," and argued upon that and made that the basis 
of his appeal to his Roman of high grade. Paul did 
the same thing. It was a recognition, an inten- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 51 

tional recognition, of the fact that the law which God 
promulgated of old for his people Israel was still 
the law for the world, and that it could never be 
abrogated or set aside in favor of any other teach- 
ing. 

Personally, as I say, the antagonism between Paul 
and the Jews became intense. There are some burn- 
ing words by him about them in the First Epistle 
to the Thessalonians. You remember how, in com- 
forting them for their tribulations, he tells them: 
"You suffer the same thing we suffer from those of 
our own nation, the Jews." "They have both killed 
the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have 
persecuted us, and they please not God, and are con- 
trary to all men." His indictment is very sharp, and 
there is a tone about it that indicates that he felt 
very deeply the attitude of his people toward him; 
and he tried to defend himself when he was first 
arrested in Jerusalem by an appeal to the better ele- 
ment in their nature and to that special truth which 
was common to the Christian and the Pharisee par- 
ty, the resurrection of the dead. But it did not 
bring them any closer together, and he was a marked 
man and a hunted man, as far as his own people were 
concerned, from then until he went to get his crown. 
Yet through all, as you read time and again through 
his writings, he preserves his affection for the people, 
his longing, his hope. There is nothing more re- 
markable than that, after all his experience, their 



52 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

dealings with him and with the faith which he 
preached, he should yet cherish the belief that this 
people should become converts to Christ, and that Is- 
rael, by its acceptance of Christ, should be restored to 
its old place at the head of the nations and give to the 
world the highest instance and the purest and best 
example of Christian character. Those chapters in 
his Epistle to the Romans (nine to eleven) in which 
he vindicates Israel's original right and explains 
their failure to avail themselves of it are perhaps 
the most remarkable, under all the conditions, that 
were ever penned by any man. They stand there as 
the record of this man's intensely Jewish proclivi- 
ties; of his affection for his people, his longing to 
see them partakers of the Christ which had come to 
him and his, and his confident expectation that they 
will ultimately be recovered. Only "blindness in 
part" — it is a moderate tone; there is a gentleness 
about it, a sort of an excuse, the way he speaks — 
"blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the 
fullness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all 
Israel shall be saved." 

So you have to reckon with Paul in his new life 
as still under the influence and as bearing the im- 
press and stamp of the old Jewish faith and life. The 
shackles of Pharisaism he had shaken off, the evils 
of Sadduceeism he had never fallen in with ; but the 
old prophetic life had been rooted in him, and the 
old legal aspects of the world were the aspects upon 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 53 

which he looked at all times. The law had still va- 
lidity for him. It was made for the ungodly and 
the profane and all classes of vicious men and evil- 
doers, he declared ; and he held it to be, as to them, 
operative and effective to the last. 

Now, with that tone and character, look at the 
other side of him. He comes into relation with 
forms of life with which he had been conversant 
in his youth, whose evil quality he knew to the very 
heart of it, and which he had repudiated and con- 
demned in the strongest terms. The Gentile world 
lay under the power of the evil one. It was impos- 
sible that it should ever recover itself from that 
power. It was tainted and corrupted, rotting from 
its highest order of life down to its lowest. And yet 
he must come into relations with all this mass of 
putridity as close, binding, affectionate as he had 
ever felt or entered into with his own people. This 
is the remarkable thing about it. I do not think 
any other man could have done the work that he did 
under such conditions. You read his own account 
of the Gentile world. You have seen how he was 
met, wherever he went, by the idolaters of that 
world, and how they received his message. He made 
converts from among them. There was an element 
of despair in the life of the world at that time that 
made them ready to listen to almost any word of 
hope from any source, and multitudes of them were 
reached. But how this man could go among them 



54 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

and identify himself with Gentile life, and show the 
interest and concern for the Gentile world that he 
had always felt for his own people, is one of the 
problems in psychology that can be explained only 
by the marvelous facts and truths of our Christian 
revelation. 

He did not go to them, as I have said, until he 
had exhausted his efforts with his own people, 
"Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Je- 
sus, sent him to bless you." That was his word, and 
he held to it. But when the time came that his mis- 
sion among the Jews became an impossibility, then 
he turned freely and gladly to the Gentile world. 

One of the most remarkable things about it 19 
that, as intense as had been his own Jewish life, 
so closely bound to all the forms of it, he never 
made any attempt to impose any Jewish burden upon 
the Gentile races. He did not care to alter their 
forms of life ; he let them live as they had been wont 
to live, save only where the incongruities between 
their immoralities and the purity of Christ were 
made manifest. In his arguments with them and in 
his appeals to them he never brings in the old ground 
of legal obligation and requirement. He points out 
that these things are not compatible with their rela- 
tion to Jesus Christ; and upon that ground, and 
that alone, he insists that they shall change their 
modes of life wherever they are vicious and immoral 
and impure. But otherwise he leaves them the 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 55 

largest freedom. I think he went beyond what would 
be allowed in our more legal forms of Christian 
life in this age. He did not bother himself with 
small things; he did not try to put restraint upon 
them where nature — sinless nature, harmless nature 
— had given them liberty. He let them go their own 
way — did not seek to effect either a political or a so- 
cial revolution. I have no doubt that he had in view 
the time when, through the normal working of the 
gospel of Christ, all these forms of life should be 
changed radically. I have no doubt that he expect- 
ed the kingdom of God to be established to such an 
extent and in such form in the world as would 
bring about perfect harmony between God's thought 
and God's plan for, and the actual ordering of, hu- 
man life in the government, in society, in business, 
in the home, and in the individual life. There are 
plenty of intimations of that in his writings; but 
his was a sound mind, and he did not expect to do 
great things by leaps and bounds. He was not a 
revolutionist. The revolution would be accom- 
plished, but it would take time and the orderly proc- 
ess of God's Spirit and the working of God's Word 
to accomplish it. What he was after, first of all, 
was to get the individual man converted, and so 
to strengthen him in the faith that the elements of 
vice which dominated the world about him should 
be powerless when they came to work upon him. It 
was an individual salvation that he preached first of 



56 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

all, but it was an individual salvation that was to 
reach through individual agencies into all the circles 
of life. The Gentile world needed to be re-created. 
That was what he said in his letter to the Ephe- 
sians — you are his, God's workmanship, "created 
anew in Christ Jesus, unto good works which God 
has before ordained that you should walk in them. ,, 
The good works are not simply religious works. He 
did not mean that. He meant that the whole of our 
work of life should become God's work when God 
touched it, and should minister to God's purpose; 
and he intended that all their professions, avoca- 
tions, trades, and enterprises should come under the 
domination of Christ and be ordered by him for the 
working out of his great ends. Here you have his 
attitude before the Gentile world. He would stand 
before them and say, perhaps: "I am a Jew, Saul 
of Tarsus; I was brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, 
and was expert above many mine equals in mine 
own age in all that pertained to the Jews' religion; 
I glory in my ancestry; I belong to God's aristoc- 
racy ; I have a history behind me that I do not want 
wiped out, and I do not intend to sever my connec- 
tion with it. But I come with the offer of all the 
benefit of all this, unrestricted, to you Gentiles. 
You have been living down in the mire; you are 
corrupt all through; you see it yourselves, and you 
feel it, and the light has gone out of your life, and 
the hope has died away ; your very homes are foul ; 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 57 

you have discredited your sacred places; you have 
dishonored God, you have dishonored yourselves, 
and all the natural order has been reversed among 
you. Now I come to you and hold out before 
you this whole body of tradition and of proph- 
ecy and of law and of truth sent out to the world. 
I offer it all to you through this man Jesus Christ. 
It is yours as well as the Jew's." There is a strong 
expression in the Epistle to the Ephesians upon 
which I think sufficient stress has not been laid: 
"He . . . hath broken down the middle wall of parti- 
tion between us [that is, between Jew and Gentile] ; 
having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law 
of commandments contained in ordinances; for to 
make in himself of twain one new man." Take the 
words in their inevitable significance. He means 
evidently that there shall be a blending of the Gen- 
tiles and the Jews so as to constitute a new type of 
humanity, that which we call to-day Christian. 
The Jew is not sufficient in himself. The law which 
has made him what he is and given him his prom- 
inence, great as it was, could not accomplish the 
thing which God wanted. What it could not do 
Christ came to do. And what Christ came to do is 
accomplished, not only for the Jew, but for the Gen- 
tile also ; and the irrelevant and insufficient elements 
of the old Jewish life are to be cast away, and all 
that is best and truest in it is to be mingled with the 
freedom and the high thought and the bright light 



58 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of the Gentile world, Christ being over all and 
through all and in all, so making peace and so of 
the twain making the one new man. It was a won- 
derful conception, and he is the only one who speaks 
in that way. None of the other apostles talk about 
that kind of a blending of the Gentile and Jew. His 
great argument in his Epistle to the Romans goes 
to establish not only the right of the Gentiles to the 
gospel, but the right of the Gentile world to every 
blessing which the gospel might bring or produce. 
There was to be no mutilation of it to suit their 
lower grade of life. They were to have everything 
that any Jew could claim under it. "I come to you 
when I come in the fullness of the blessing of the 
gospel of Christ, and nothing less than that will I 
bring." And when he pours out this rich treasure 
that has been accumulated through the ages and that 
culminates in the gift of God's own Son, and says, 
"The whole of this belongs to you, the Gentile 
world equally with the Jew," he has reached the 
highest possible point of human anticipation and at- 
tainment. He has come to an expectation of life 
in its loftiest qualities, in its brightest conceptions, 
in its largest possibilities, that nobody else ever knew, 
and he has left that for us — for the Gentile world. 

I do not think I am in error in my reading of 
Paul's life and his dealings with these people. I 
think that was his mind toward Jew and Gentile. 
He wanted to bring them so closely together and to 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 59 

identify them so thoroughly that either should have 
all the other could have; the Jew should have the 
liberty which Christ gave to the Gentile, and the 
Gentile should have the glorious heritage that had 
descended to the Jew through the ages past. And 
so the new man should have and possess and realize 
in personal experience everything that God had ever 
given to man. I think that is one of the great mean- 
ings of that great Epistle to the Romans. 

Let me say, just to conclude now, that there is a 
larger meaning to all that than we are apt to imagine. 
We have a great deal of talk about missions in our 
day, and are striving very earnestly to fulfill the mis- 
sionary demand of our gospel. We are just getting 
some faint glimmerings of what it is intended that 
we shall do, but we have not got the Pauline con- 
ception of it yet. We have only come to the realiza- 
tion of about this much : These people are very ig- 
norant; they are very gross and superstitious; they 
are idolaters; they are unclean in life; their social 
order is impossible and undesirable, and their gov- 
ernments are based upon false views of human char- 
acter and human understanding. Everything of 
this sort must be overturned, and we must, through 
our Christian agencies and influences, bring them to 
a better view of things, to a life more in accordance 
with our own. Very good as far as it goes. When 
the missionary goes on the field, he gets hold of com- 
paratively few of the great masses, gets them con- 



60 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

verted, and they become centers of influence and 
power. And the work is spreading. But it is to be 
manifested in its consequences far more widely than 
men really imagine. The only new man is yet to 
come out of this, between us and between them. 
Somehow or other it has come to pass in the ages 
that the Jewish quality has transferred itself to large 
sections of that part of the world which calls itself 
Christendom. We think that we are the people, 
that we have inherited these things, and that no- 
body can come into full possession of what we have ; 
that others may be fed with the crumbs that fall 
from our table, but that they can never have the full 
benefit, are not capable of having the full benefit, of 
the gospel which accrues to us. Paul would say that 
you are nothing better than a Pharisee in that view. 
These people in the outlying world are just as capa- 
ble of getting the larger benefits — the adoption, and 
the glory, and the covenants, and the gift of the law, 
and the promise, and the Christ — just as capable of 
the whole of them as you are. God never made a 
man that was not capable of them, and never will — 
the normal man. There may be idiots, imbeciles, 
insane, but God will take care of them ; but the nor- 
mal man is not to be found that is not capable of 
taking in the whole profit and benefit of our gospel 
and of so entering into the fellowship with the 
great body of Christ as that he and they, acting and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 61 

reacting upon each other, shall constitute, in a sense 
that we do not yet discern, a new man. 

What shall be that type? It is going to obliter- 
ate a great many distinctions which we hold fast to 
now. It is going to wipe out, it may be, lines of de- 
marcation between nations. It is going to bring into 
the common heritage of the Church elements and 
forces that will lift it higher, bring it nearer to God, 
and transform it more thoroughly into the image of 
Christ. The fullness of the Gentiles must come in be- 
fore we can realize the whole benefit of our gospel. 
But Paul would have stood before any congregation 
in any land to-day and have said: "There is not a 
thing I have spoken of in these Epistles — Romans, 
Ephesians, Corinthians — not one of all the benefits 
and all the great gifts provided there that is not in- 
tended for you and for every Gentile anywhere on the 
face of the earth. I come to you with the fullness 
of the blessing of the gospel of Christ." Himself 
full of Christ, and having blended in his own per- 
sonal experience the large and free life of the Gen- 
tile world with the integrity and steadfastness and 
intentness and devoutness of the old Jewish life; 
this man who had them both blended in himself 
and had been made into such an instance of God's 
workmanship as the world has not seen since;, 
this man would have said: "Yours, yours on any 
shore, in any clime, and under any conditions of life 
— yours is the fullness of the blessing of the gospel." 



LECTURE IV. 

It would not be inappropriate to preface the prin- 
cipal theme of the hour with a word or two in re- 
lation to Paul's conception of God. Laying stress, 
as he does, so decidedly upon the person, work, and 
relations of the Son of God, many have failed to 
discern the fact that he has given perhaps the clear- 
est and most striking expression to the conception of 
God that the world has known. He was a Jew, of 
course, and had the Jewish view of God — the Jeho- 
vah, God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, the 
God of providence and of his people, Israel's God. 

At the advanced stage at which we take it now 
you will note that there is no reference whatever 
in his later career — that is, his writings — to God as 
the God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and 
Jacob. Now he is the God and Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, and he deals with him in that light and 
under that relation particularly. 

But he is almost, on one side of his conception, 
what in this day would be called an agnostic. God 
is the invisible God, whom no man hath seen nor 
can see, dwelling in light that no man can approach 
unto, and holds in that sublime altitude a being 
which is beyond the comprehension of human minds. 
Nevertheless, he is not only the God transcendent 

(62) 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 63 

over all, but he is the God immanent, through all and 
in all; and he is in immediate relation to the inner 
life, and the outer life too, of everyone who be- 
lieves in his Son. He is not a God afar off, but nigh 
at hand; and though we may not have any faculty 
by which we can discern him, he is only the more 
real to us because we take him by faith and see 
him through Jesus Christ. I cannot enlarge upon 
this, but the special view of the apostle is worthy of 
your consideration and your study. You cannot 
leave it out of account when you come to consider 
the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

You have to take into consideration another thing 
dealing with his relation to and view of the Son 
of God. He does not take it from any earthly 
source ; he had no teacher in this world. The vision 
from heaven was his first disclosure of the place and 
of the power of Jesus. And he refers to that not, as 
we should suppose, in writing to the Galatians partic- 
ularly and to others also, in the same line of thought 
— as the sensuous manifestation, the great visible 
glory of his person — as in the accounts recorded in 
the book of Acts; but the permanent record in his 
Epistles is to the effect that it pleased God to reveal 
his Son in him. That side of it accorded better with 
Paul's mental habitude, as well as with his spiritual 
tendency, than the open declaration, visible mani- 
festation. He did not go through the same course 
of training that the other apostles did. He did not 



64 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

know Christ after the flesh, as they knew him, and he 
had not to be trained by the slow process which they 
underwent to the acceptance and confession of him 
as the Christ, the Son of the living God. When he 
heard his voice and saw that light, that was the end 
of the whole matter with him. He surrendered at 
once all his preconceptions. All his notions, as taken 
from what he had heard of the Son of Man, were 
at once dismissed, and he could henceforth regard 
him only as the Lord exalted to the throne of the 
majesty in the heavens. From that point of view he 
considers him evermore. 

Yet you have the strange paradox, not to say con- 
tradiction, that when he comes to the preaching of 
Christ he lays especial emphasis on Christ crucified. 
That is the power of God unto salvation to them that 
believe. But even there you have to consider anoth- 
er element in the Pauline character. He does not 
seem disposed to look at anything from the fleshly, 
the earthly side. As he himself said : "We look not 
at the things which are seen, but at the things which 
are not seen." And he takes his conception and view 
of all things, Christ included, from the spiritual and 
the eternal world. If he had been trained along 
with the others, taught, as they had been, by the 
speech and the manifold works of the Son of Man, 
he would probably have put his gospel in another 
shape. But "my gospel," as he so emphatically 
terms it, is to be divested of all the mere sensuous 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 65 

elements before it can be made effective in his un- 
derstanding of it. So you may put the full signifi- 
cance into his own statement, "Know we no man 
after the flesh : yea, though we have known Christ 
after the fleshy yet now henceforth know we him no 
more," in that way. 

Another thing you must consider : that all his un- 
derstanding of Christ he credits to revelation, im- 
mediate and direct. He is the most independent 
man — self -centered, you may say — of whom we have 
any record. He does not acknowledge indebtedness 
to anybody, those who were apostles before him or 
to anybody else, for his knowledge of the Son of 
God or for the whole train of consequences follow- 
ing upon his apprehension and appreciation of him. 
When he has seen that light, he says : "I did not con- 
fer with flesh and blood." The natural disposition of 
the ordinary class of men would have been to go to 
the men who had been in fellowship with the Son of 
God, inquire about this thing, and learn the de- 
tails of his life. Possibly when Paul did get with 
them he learned some of the facts of his incarnate 
life from them, but he never made any use of these 
facts. He himself says that he conferred not with 
flesh and blood, and did not go up to Jerusalem to 
those that were apostles before him, but went away 
into Arabia. He was there, according to all the 
chronological data that we can gather, about three 
years. And he charges everything that he gained in 



66 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

the way of the knowledge of the Son of God directly 
to revelation. He did not receive it from men, nei- 
ther through men, but by revelation of Jesus Christ. 
Those are his own terms. This seems to be the tone 
of his utterance from beginning to end. 

It is significant, and at the same time a little singu- 
lar from our point of view, that in all his Epistles 
there is not the slightest reference to any of Christ's 
great works except the resurrection. Miracles are 
left out of the account, so far as the development of 
Christian life is concerned. He wrought miracles 
himself, and he knew that the other apostles wrought 
them ; but he lays no stress upon them as involved in 
the life of our Lord, and never refers to any work 
that our Lord had wrought while in the flesh save to 
the one great historic transaction that has more of 
the spiritual than of the natural in it — his resurrec- 
tion from the dead. 

So that he claims for his view of the Son of God 
something more than the authority of apostolic teach- 
ing. It stands out at least as the one feature in his ut- 
terance for which he is indebted only to the Son of 
God himself — he takes nothing at second hand there. 
He may be willing in other points to submit himself 
to their judgment and direction — matters that con- 
cern the mere ordering of life under this great lead- 
ership he may require at their hands — but when it 
comes to these essential verities, he is indebted to no 
man, and will be indebted to no man. He will ac- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 67 

knowledge nobody as his master or teacher there but 
the Lord himself, and from him he gets all that is 
requisite for the development as well as the initia- 
tion of Christian experience. Even as regards the 
lesson of the Lord's Supper, he received it by rev- 
elation, and gives the terms of it, the terms which 
we use to-day in our service, rather than any other. 
He does not take the line from other apostles who 
had practiced the observance before him. Accord- 
ingly, therefore, we have to look upon this as a spe- 
cial matter; and if he is right in his attitude, we 
have from him the one peculiarly defined revelation 
of the person and place of Jesus Christ, and his 
mind concerning Christ is one that has been formed 
and inspired directly from on high. 

The opening of the Epistle to the Romans gives 
you in very brief form the ground of his whole con- 
ception. He was called to be an apostle and a her- 
ald of the gospel, and that gospel concerned Jesus 
Christ, who was the Son of David according to the 
flesh, and declared to be (I don't like that word "de- 
clared" there; it is not a proper rendering of the 
word that Paul used, and it does not express what 
I suppose was in his mind. We have no word that 
exactly expresses it, but I think the term "designate" 
would be better) or designated the Son of God with 
power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the 
resurrection from the dead. These three elements, 
concurring, set him apart and declare him to be 



68 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

marked off as not merely of fleshly descent — though 
it be royal, partaker of the Davidic stock, kingly — 
but, as all that is involved in the future of the world, 
according to Messianic prophecy. More than this, 
by these three terms he is set aside and uniquely de- 
clared to be the Son of God. 

Power — well, you think at once, when you come 
to use that term, of all its various expressions in our 
natural and sensuous life. It is the term used for 
miracles, for the most part; and yet it could not 
have been used to designate miracles if it had not 
had something more, if there had not been something 
more in the miracle than a merely physical or natural 
operation in the effect. He gives his best and high- 
est conception of power in that marvelous passage 
in the Epistle to the Ephesians where he prays that 
they may know "what is the exceeding greatness of 
his power [God's power] to usward who believe, ac- 
cording to the energy of the might of his strength." 
He exhausts the terms for force; uses everything 
that can give, in any way, expression to what is in- 
cluded in the dynamics of the Almighty, "according 
to the energy of the might of his strength, which he 
wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the 
dead." The whole power of the Godhead is in- 
volved in that matter of the resurrection. It is the 
supreme expression and, I might say, the final ex- 
pression of God's power. But it lies over in an- 
other sphere. It does not belong to this natural side. 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 69 

The mere bringing of a man back from the tomb to 
the natural life was not a new thing, and there was 
no such superabundance and overflow of divine 
power in that as would satisfy the mind of Paul. 
He got rid of all the merely natural associations, 
plunged boldly out into the sphere of the unseen 
and eternal, and found in the movement of spiritual 
forces there the last, the exhaustive (if I dare say 
such a thing) expression of God's power. 

It is for that reason that he associates it here, in 
this passage in Romans, with the resurrection from 
the dead. It is an act of divine power which com- 
passes conditions that we have no conception of 
here. These conditions do not belong to mortal, 
natural life. They are things to be regarded as of 
inferior quality and of a lower order. But when 
you want to find the greatness of God, to discover 
the great qualities and powers of his nature, you 
have to get rid of everything that is sensuous and 
formal and merely natural, as we use that term, and 
get out into the broader regions of the spiritual world 
where God makes his home and where only he can 
completely exhibit himself. You find the last ex- 
pression of divine power in the resurrection of this 
Jesus, and that not simply as the work of God, as 
an expression of what God can do and does, but, 
more than that, it is the inevitable result of the spirit 
of holiness that belongs essentially to him, makes 
him what he is, and indues him with the prerogative 



jo The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of the right to life of which death could not deprive 
him. For it was impossible, in the mind of Peter, 
that he should be holden of death; and Paul echoes 
the statement, brings out these great features, and 
declares that they shut him off and mark him clearly 
to the world as the Son of God, immediately related 
to God, in virtue of his capability of such things and 
of his realization of such results in his personal life. 

Now, if you pass on a little farther and look into 
the Epistle to the Colossians, for example, you find 
another form of expression equally impressive, per- 
haps more so, in some aspects of it, and farther- 
reaching: "In whom we have redemption through 
his blood, the forgiveness of sins, who is the image 
of the invisible God." Invisible, but with an image. 
It is not the term that is used in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews : "The express image of his person." That 
is our word — "character." This is the word which 
is much used in Russia and abused, the ehcmv, the im- 
age, presentation, and representation of an invisible 
God. It marks a new turn in human thought about 
God. 

It was not new that God should be presented as 
invisible, unapproachable. The world had felt that 
and admitted it. The Gentile world, with the vague 
idea it had of a supreme being lying back of all false 
gods and fates and all that sort of thing, had that 
notion. He is the unknown God. But that the in- 
visible God should project himself into a likeness and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 71 

image, and set that forth as showing himself to the 
universe — that was a new note conveyed. That was 
precisely what Paul intended to say : You cannot see 
God. He lies in the abyss of his own unfathomable 
nature, unsearchable by men or angels. You cannot 
approach him; the light is too dazzling, and blinds 
you as you come near. But here is his image, and 
it is a true image, and it is the only image of God, 
and it is the eternal image of God; for he was the 
First-Born, before the whole creation, so that he 
stands directly in the place of God, as far as all be- 
neath is concerned, the whole order of being, all or- 
ders of being. He is thus at once put in his rightful 
place as the only Mediator between the invisible God 
and the searching inquiry of the inquisitive mind and 
heart of the world. You may go on from that, trac- 
ing every natural sequence; and when you come to 
think of all that is involved in this, he is the First- 
Born of the whole creation; for through him were 
all things made, visible and invisible, in heaven and 
earth. The whole power of creation is vested in 
him, and he becomes (I speak after the manner of 
men) at once responsible for the whole. It is the 
expression of his mind, as he is the image of the in- 
visible God. He utters his own thought in all that 
he has made; and in him, and in him only, all 
things consist, hold together, constitute a system 
and a unity, and maintain their life — they have 
none apart from him. That is the place which Paul 



J2 The Life and Mind of Paul 

gives him. It is unique, absolutely; a place that 
nobody in all the range of created being, no matter 
how high he may be, can hold. The Arian concep- 
tion of Christ does not at all meet the demand. It 
falls within the range of creation, and hence it is 
impossible that it should take this place, speak of the 
whole, dominate it by the sheer force of its own 
nature and person, and in virtue of its own imme- 
diate relation, first to God and then, on the other 
side, to the creation, for which it is itself responsi- 
ble. But he who is known to us as he was known to 
Paul, as the Son of God, in the sense in which no 
other being claimed to be, is Lord, and the only 
Lord, after all. 

You have there, too, what will be accepted in the 
days to come as the philosophy, and the only possi- 
ble philosophy, of the universe. You know how 
the philosophers have been searching around for 
what they call the "unity of nature." They have been 
trying to get some link of connection between a 
God whom they know not and this ghost material of 
the universe with which we have to deal. They 
have searched in every direction, explored the re- 
cesses of mind, and sought out the secrets of nature, 
and have discussed them and discoursed upon them 
with all the wisdom of this world. These manifold 
forms of philosophic thought are marvelous, and 
yet they have never reached a system of thought that 
would commend itself as satisfactory or sufficient 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 73 

to any well-trained mind. I don't think Hegel was 
ever content with his own. He was always trying 
to improve it, and so of every one of the great 
leaders in thought. They never found a system that 
perfectly satisfied themselves. But take this in its 
whole course and you have got the links of connec- 
tion, and the only possible ones. If there be such a 
God, if he is made known at all, he must be made 
known through some one who is partaker of himself 
and can come out into direct relation with all crea- 
tion as the image of God, and the representative of 
God, and the expression of the power of God. There 
is nothing else possible to it. The Gnostics had the 
idea, but they got it mixed up with a vast range or 
series falling off as it descended, of beings, aeons, 
and attempted to link up along their chain the gross 
material and the divine nature. They failed utterly, 
because they failed to perceive that there was but 
one link of connection, and that was to be found only 
in him who was God's fellow and man's Master and 
Lord and Creator. But when you take that, the 
whole thing simplifies itself. There is God over all, 
through all, and in all. He has manifested himself 
in the only possible form, the Son, the image of the 
invisible God. He has brought himself, through 
that Son, into open expression, so that by his works 
his eternal power and Godhead may be known. And 
he has so identified himself through the Son with 
the whole order of creation as that men may recog- 



74 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

nize this as God's workmanship and avail themselves 
of it as furnishing the material and resources upon 
which human life and all other life is to be fed, and 
must be fed, until the end. When that system (I 
have only touched the first half of it; the other half 
concerns the sign of redemption) is finally worked 
out and men begin to understand it, then we may 
have a philosophy satisfactory to the mind of man — 
one that shall accord in all its parts and principles 
with what, after all, in its character and issues is the 
supreme philosophy of the universe, the gospel of the 
Son of God. 

Now you have just these beginnings, as I may say, 
of the revelation of Jesus Christ. Paul had his 
thought of him laid back upon those foundations. 
He was not content to take what the apostles had 
used and go through that course of natural life, and 
by slow degrees and broadening vision get the final 
conception of the Son of God. When he got that 
one view, that ended the whole matter. It flashed 
across his mind with the completeness and the sud- 
denness of a divine inspiration that this was the so- 
lution of any and every question. Thenceforth his 
business was to bring into logical relation (if I may 
use such a phrase ; he uses it himself, though, so I sup- 
pose I may be justified in it) the risen Christ, the 
image of the invisible God, set off and marked as the 
Son of God, and the Christ crucified — the hard- 
est problem that the human mind ever had to en- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 75 

counter. We have not settled it to our own sat- 
isfaction yet. It is hard for us when we look at 
the Christ, hear the groans and see the blood, and 
our hearts are torn by the expressed agony of that 
form. That is all human; it is of the earth. It 
does not belong to the spiritual side of things; and 
we marvel at it and glory in it, and many of us 
glory in it mainly because it is of our own sort. It 
belongs to our own natural order of life. But when 
Paul speaks of glorying in the cross, he does it in 
a very different tone : "By which the world is cru- 
cified unto me, and I unto the world.' ' He does not 
take it as the crucifixion of Christ simply, but as 
in his person the utter destruction of the forces of 
this world as they stand out against him. He is 
looking at it from that height. He was looking out 
at the Lord, I doubt not, just as John saw him in the 
first scene of the apocalyptic vision; just as he thinks 
of the cross and sees it to-day — not the humiliation, 
but the way of the final conflict and the supreme tri- 
umph, the treading down and overcoming of the 
forces of evil of all the world as they brought them- 
selves to bear upon him in that last bloody struggle. 
It was not his defeat ; the resurrection told that. It 
was their defeat. And it was their defeat because 
he was not only the Son of man, the highest repre- 
sentative of the race, but he was the Son of God. 

I do not know whether it is possible for us, in our 
present state, to get at the whole truth — nay, I may 



j6 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

say it is not possible. Our faculties are too limited 
and our discernment of spiritual things is defective. 
We shall have to get rid of a good deal of the fleshly 
prejudice and disposition, the mind of the flesh 
( which we cannot completely conquer until we get rid 
of it), before we can get into the real spiritual signifi- 
cance of the person and life of Christ. But Paul, 
whether he had heard the words that were put on 
record by John long after Paul wrote, or whether he 
had heard them by tradition or through the other 
apostles, or whether he had learned them from his 
Lord, still got the significance of them, and put the 
whole meaning into his own understanding of truth 
and in his own expression of it : "The flesh profiteth 
nothing ; it is the Spirit that giveth life." He held to 
that and lived that, and he interprets the cross, inter- 
prets the whole life of Christ, from that side. I 
think you may easily account for his silence as to the 
whole incarnate career of the Son of God upon that 
ground. I don't want to know him after the flesh. I 
have got a higher view of him. I have seen him, 
and I know what he is. He belongs to that sphere, 
and I am not going to belittle him or narrow him by 
putting him down within the range of our merely 
natural, historic, and incarnate movement and life. 

But you will note still another thing about him. 
He does not, as we are accustomed to do, distin- 
guish between the risen Christ and the Christ in the 
flesh. It is not with the life broken up into sections. 



The Life and Mind of PauL y h / l 

The Christ of the resurrection and the glory is the 
same as the Christ on the cross and the preexisting 
Christ. It is a continuous life with him, through all 
its accidents and incidents. It does not change. He 
is the same in a broader sense than the writer of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews meant it. He is the same 
yesterday and to-day and forever. Paul talks about 
him in that way: "Ye know the grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your 
sakes he became poor" — the same, just a continuous 
movement in that eternal life. And he accounts for 
the whole thing by that wonderful passage in the 
Epistle to the Philippians : "Who, being in the form 
of God, . . . emptied himself, taking the form of 
a servant, . . . becoming obedient even unto death. . . . 
Wherefore also God highly exalted hirn, and gave 
unto him the name which is above every name ; that 
in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, . . . and 
that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is 
Lord." That links them all together. He that was 
in the form of God is exactly the same as he who 
emptied himself, was made in the likeness of men, 
took the form of a servant, humbled himself unto 
death, and is exalted again. It is almost in exact 
correspondence with that wonderful closing para- 
graph of our Lord's great prayer : "I will that they 
also whom thou hast given me, be with me, . . . 
that they may behold my glory, which I had with 
thee before the world was." 



£8 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

So the conception of Christ as the Son of God 
and as the expression of God, the image of the in- 
visible God, carries with it that timelessness which 
dates him back. There never was a moment when 
he did not exist. In Paul's view of it, there never 
was a period in all the eternities when he was not as 
closely identified with God and with God's work- 
manship as he has been revealed to us to be in this 
last time. The mystery may have been hidden 
through the ages; but it was there, and has simply 
been disclosed to us in these times. So he brings 
that continuous life, eternal life of the Son of God, 
out of the mists and darkness of the past eternities, 
sets it out into the clear light, and says: "Now 
you have God's whole secret; there is nothing hid- 
den." As the Master himself said : "All things that 
the Father hath are mine, and the Spirit shall take 
of mine and show it to you." I bring you the last 
result of the revelation in Jesus Christ. I want you 
to understand that you will never get any more than 
this. You are complete in him, for in him dwelleth 
all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and in him 
are hid all the treasures of wisdom and of knowl- 
edge. Now, what can you make out of all that? 
I have given you specimens simply. You may search 
Paul through, and you will find that it is his dis- 
tinctive characteristic that he preaches and treats 
of Christ. He does not dwell much, while what he 
does say is wonderfully expressive, on God the Fa- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 79 

ther; but every Epistle, almost every line of every 
Epistle, is stamped with the seal and name of the Son 
of God. I do not wonder that at Antioch, where he 
preached Christ, the term "Christian" first came into 
vogue. When he talks about his own relation to the 
Father and to the eternal life, it is in Christ all the 
time. Christ in you is your hope of glory. "We 
preach Christ, admonishing every man and teaching 
every man, in all wisdom," because it is all hid in 
him, "that we may present every man perfect in 
Christ Jesus." The constant phrase of his Chris- 
tian life and experience is "in Christ." The Chris- 
tian life is a life that is characterized by that feature. 
It is identified with Christ by living. "Not I, but 
Christ liveth in me." "For ye are dead, and your 
life is hid with Christ in God." Christ takes his 
place as First-Born of the whole creation, its rightful 
Lord. He is the Head of the body, the Head of the 
Church of the living God, and he is the Head over 
all things to the Church, and so he becomes actually 
supreme. You cannot put anybody else in his place, 
and you cannot take him out of his place without 
scattering the universe, dissipating it, destroying it. 
You cannot take him out of the place that he holds 
in the Church of God without reducing the Church 
to a mere club ; henceforth it has no place among the 
religious forces of the world. It gets its character 
from this, that it is the Church of Jesus Christ ; and 
for evermore it is not only to be known by that name, 



80 The Life and Mind of Paul, 

but it is to express the mind and spirit of Christ. 
Paul will have no Church and will have no Christian 
life that is not rooted and grounded in it. "Other 
foundation can no man lay than that which is laid" — 
that is, Christ Jesus. And he is at one with his Lord 
there. His Master said practically the same thing, 
so that Christ becomes literally, to the apostle, all in 
all. He would say to you : "I don't know God now 
except through Christ. When I want to search out 
God, I go to my Master and my Lord. He has mani- 
fested himself, and in manifesting himself has mani- 
fested the Father; and whoever wants to know the 
Father has only to comply with the requirement of 
the Lord : 'If any man keep my word, my Father will 
love him, and we will come unto him, and make our 
abode with him.' " He is as solicitous for the main- 
tenance of that absolute union between the Father 
and the Son as the Master himself was. "He that 
is in me is in the Father." "Believe me, that I am 
in the Father and the Father in me." "The words 
that I speak unto you I speak not of myself : but the 
Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works." It 
is all God, because it is all Christ. Christ and God are 
identified in such sort and so fully as that henceforth 
the world can never know God except in and through 
Christ. There is no use talking about deism or of 
any theism that does not come within the range of 
this gospel. There is no use to talk about any process 
of salvation that proceeds from any divine source 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 81 

that leaves him out of the question. There is no use 
to talk of any providence that does not include the 
immediate relation of the Son of God to the Father 
and to the world as the Father's only representative. 
Christ is all and in all; and instead of being nar- 
rowed down by such a conception, shut within the 
limits, we simply open out more widely the possibili- 
ties of our own nature. We get nearer to God there 
than we can in any other way, and have larger views 
of God. You can go back as far as you please in the 
eternities. There is nothing in all the history of the 
Godhead, if I may use such a term about him, with 
which Christ is not connected and identified. You 
may take the whole course of human history. Wher- 
ever God has come, Christ has been. You may take 
the present attitude and prospect of our humanity. 
There lies no hope for the future unless it be ground- 
ed in and settled upon the Christ as the Son of the 
living God. When you put God up into the deistic 
atmosphere or reduce him to the theism of the 
world's old philosophies, you simply make it impossi- 
ble that there should be any revelation of him to the 
inner life of man — his soul, his heart, his conscience 
— that there should be any direct and immediate con- 
trol of him over the ordering of life; that there 
should be any hope for man in the outcome of his 
history, for man would then be left simply to his 
own notions of what God may be and to his own or- 
dering of his life without God. It is only in Christ 
6 



82 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

that we begin to realize that God is not only God 
transcendent over all, but he is through all and in 
all. The incarnation is not dwelt upon with any spe- 
cial emphasis by Paul, simply because Christ is one in 
his view, whether he is incarnate, or before the incar- 
nation or after. He does not make any distinction, 
but the incarnation was simply bringing God in 
Christ into more manifest relations to our life. Apart 
from that, there would have been no such conception 
of God in his personal relation to our humanity as 
now charges the whole thought and feeling of the 
Church of God. Apart from the incarnation, we 
should never have been able to bring ourselves into 
immediate contact with God. Now the whole being 
of the man, when he believes in Jesus Christ, thrills 
with the consciousness of God in him; and all the 
movement of his life, under the direction of his Mas- 
ter and Lord, is under the energy and impulse of the 
Godhead. The Spirit of God, representative of all 
the forces in the divine nature, the personal and im- 
mediate representative of Jesus Christ himself, the 
exponent of his life and work, comes and lives and 
dwells in us and moves us along the lines which the 
Master himself indicates for our life. 

I do not know that it is worth while to go beyond 
this as indicating Paul's place and his mind in the 
Church in relation to what is the fundamental fact. 
This is the critical thing, as you may have seen from 
what I have said. In the whole Christian system 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 83 

you may have everything else; but if the true con- 
ception and realization of Christ be left out, the rest 
is but rooted in sand, and you cannot hold it to- 
gether, for there is no cohesive power in the terms 
of the system. If you leave Christ out, it is practi- 
cally impossible that you should ever come into any 
personal fellowship with God. God remains remote 
and inaccessible. He is not henceforth the God that 
hears prayer. He is not the God that sympathizes 
with our humanity in its trouble and evil. He is not 
the God to reach out the helping hand to the weak. 
But if Christ be, as he is proclaimed by Paul to be, 
the center and source of all the life of the Godhead 
to us, then, indeed, we have got all the forces and re- 
sources of the Godhead enlisted in our behalf; not 
only charging themselves with our interests, but 
coming down to take part in our life and directing 
all our movements, so that they shall issue according 
to God's will and highest aim for us unto the largest 
life of which our nature is capable. We owe it all to 
Christ, and to Christ as Paul gives him to us. 

It is worth while to call your attention to what 
you are perfectly familiar with, but which is ger- 
mane to this matter. Paul wrote before any of the 
Gospels was written. His is the first record that 
we have of the place that Christ has in the Church 
and in the world. Matthew and Mark and Luke and 
John and James and Peter and Jude — all wrote after 
him. And I doubt not that somewhat of their view 



84 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

(they agree substantially with him) was taken from 
him. The letters were circulated widely. They 
could hardly have failed to be read, some of them 
at least; and they make Paul's impression of Christ 
upon the Church and upon the world before any 
other of the great representatives of the gospel, 
of the true gospel, is heard or seen in the Churches. 
Paul, as Christ's immediate and first exponent to 
the world, gives us the nearest — and I do not hesi- 
tate to say the truest, as it is the broadest and loft- 
iest — view of the Son of God in his relation to all 
the worlds and to all orders of being. 



LECTURE V. 

I will read to you a section from the Epistle to 
the Colossians, to which I referred yesterday. At 
that time I gave you the first half of it, so that you 
might have some conception of what was in Paul's 
mind in regard to Jesus Christ, the First-Born of the 
whole creation, through whom all things were creat- 
ed, visible and invisible; all the thrones, dominions, 
principalities, or powers — all things were created by 
him, through him, and unto him. That gives him 
his place and determines of necessity his character, 
for there is nothing artificial in God's dealings. If 
he holds that place, it is because it is essential and 
rightfully his ; it belongs to him of his character. 

Now, if you look at the other aspect of the case 
(I am afraid to trust my memory, so I will look into 
the New Testament), "He is the Head of the body, 
the Church" — somewhat shifting the ground, rec- 
ognizing the existence of a chosen and called num- 
ber to whom he is, in special and closer relations, 
Head. You know how Paul dwells upon that in 
various places in his Epistles and makes the very 
life and movement of the Church, the ecclesia, de- 
pend upon the Head; and he is this necessarily, be- 
cause he is the Beginning, the First-Born from the 
dead. It was a startling change, and I think it was 

(85) 



86 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

a sort of shock of that kind that moved the mind 
of Paul and influenced him in almost all that he 
wrote in regard to Christ. You must remember 
that he began where the other apostles left off. His 
first vision of the Son of God was as he is in glory. 
He didn't see him in his humiliation and in the 
midst of the torture of the cross. His first view 
of him was as the exalted Christ ; and as I said be- 
fore, it must have required an immense effort even 
of that great intellect of his. I am not speaking on 
the purely spiritual thing now, but as an intellectual 
thing it must have required an immense effort of his 
to reconcile these two sides of the revelation of the 
Son of God. He could not hesitate a moment as to 
the glorified Christ, and he had to find how it was 
that the Christ on the cross also was, as John said, 
glorified. Christ is the Beginning, the First-Born 
from the dead; and out of that resurrection from 
the dead comes to Paul the disclosure of the mean- 
ing of the whole transaction, because it seemed good 
that all fullness should dwell in him. Nothing that 
pertained to human history and human experience 
was to be foreign to it. As it all had its origin in him 
and took its shape and direction from him, so it must 
find its fulfillment in his personal life and experience. 
All fullness — all fulfillment, if you choose — must 
dwell in him. 

And then comes the crucial statement, the central 
point, I am tempted to say, of his entire course and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 87 

career through the eternities; the only point upon 
which his eternal life, with all its qualities and dispo- 
sitions and divine powers, converges, and from which 
dated, I dare say, speaking after the manner of men, 
the eternal history yet to come. Having settled the 
disorder and quieted the discord and brought back old 
harmony, he made peace through the blood of his 
cross. That is the marvelous statement — that 
through him all things, whether things upon earth, 
or things in the heavens, in so far as they were dis- 
ordered by the fact of earth's disorder, were recon- 
ciled. Disturb one planet in the whole vast range of 
creation, and all are thrown out of order. You come 
down to the personal application of it: "You that 
were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind, 
by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled in the 
body of his flesh through death, to present you holy 
and unblamable and unreprovable in his sight : if ye 
continue in the faith." 

That states the case on that side of it as far as 
Paul's conception and appreciation of Jesus Christ 
were concerned. It involves the whole question of 
redemption; it includes that thing which we call 
and which he has called elsewhere atonement. It 
runs out to absolute completeness the disclosure 
and revelation of the person and the work — not the 
work during his incarnate life simply, but the whole 
eternal work — of God's Son. We speak sometimes 
of what he did in the flesh and of his relation to us 



88 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

as being a sort of accidental thing, arbitrary, perhaps, 
not essential to his person or to his place in the God- 
head. That is not the conception that Paul enter- 
tained. After he had gotten his view of the Son of 
Man, he assigns him his place and designates the 
movement of his eternal life as a necessity, the essen- 
tial thing with him. What made it a necessity we 
shall see by and by; but just now, if we want to get 
Paul's conception of our Lord, we shall have to divest 
ourselves of all the prejudices we have entertained in 
regard to schemes and plans and all that sort of thing. 
God does not make schemes and draw up plans ; but 
he is, and whatever comes from him comes by virtue 
of the necessary working of his divine nature. His 
Son is the inevitable expression of himself; and into 
all of the possible circumstances and conditions of 
creation the Son, by the necessity of his person and 
his relation to the Father, flings himself. If he is to 
keep creation at all related to the Father, he must do 
it. So when I begin to think of him as the Redeemer, 
the Atoner, the Atonement, I, for my part, have 
thrown off absolutely every notion of an artificial ar- 
rangement and legal fiction. We interpret Paul's 
terms as though they were technical, as we are accus- 
tomed to use those terms. Paul was not limited in 
that way, but he used a variety of terms and used 
them all correctly in their relations, and I suppose 
he used them because there were none others to be 
found that would give expression to his thought and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 89 

meaning. But he never had any idea of being bound 
down by the technical language of mere artificial 
thought and plans. Courts of justice are not the 
precedents by which God works, and human judg- 
ments are not the basis of divine determination. 
"His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are his 
ways our ways." Absolutely inalienable and eternal 
relations constitute the only ground upon which God 
presents himself to us and upon which he works in 
relation to us, and we have to take him as he is. You 
cannot tie him up with your fictions and your 
schemes. So when we come to think of Christ as the 
Redeemer, we begin just where Paul does, in the fact 
that he stands in such relation to the universe, to 
men, and to the Church as made his interposition, if 
there was to be any interposition at all, the necessity 
of the case. There was none other that could take 
his place. His place was absolutely unique. God 
could not (with all reverence I say it) have created a 
being to bear the same relations to himself and as- 
sume the same responsibilities as Head of the whole 
creation. It must come out of the natural relation- 
ship of the Father and the Son. He is the image of 
the invisible God, and as such and by virtue of that 
he reveals himself in all the transactions of creation 
and the processes of providence. He intervenes as 
being (I hesitate to use the word, and yet there is 
none other that can express it) responsible for that 
universe, and he takes the responsibility upon him- 



90 The Life and Mind of PauL 

self as nobody else can. We sometimes talk about 
the vicarious effort. It is vicarious in one view ; but 
that does not exhaust the thing, and it is only a small 
part of it. Why was the vicarious effort ? For the 
simple reason that he only could offer himself for 
and in the place of his own workmanship. Nobody 
else could take that office upon himself. Nobody else 
could discharge that function in the divine kingdom. 
Christ alone — because all things consist in him, and 
he is responsible for their being and the order in 
which they stand — could take it upon himself to 
restore the order and get rid of the disturbances. 
The whole question resolves itself into a matter 
whose full significance we can never understand un- 
til we see it in the light of the throne. Our eyes 
must be opened in a clearer atmosphere, and we must 
have visions of the Son of Man such as we have 
never had. We must, as John says, see him as he 
is before we can fully understand all that is involved 
in this work of his and in the relations which he 
sustains to God and man, out of which, naturally 
and necessarily, flows this work of redemption. 

There are many theories of the atonement, and 
yet I may say that there is no theory of atonement 
in Paul's writings. What he wrote was simply the 
inevitable result of his own experience, and it was 
like the man. He was not content to take anybody 
else's thought and use it. He had not searched 
heathen records and law courts and books of philos- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 91 

ophy to find out these things ; but he had been face 
to face with his Lord, and the impression produced 
upon him by that revelation brought out this his 
thought and his experience of what the atonement 
meant and how it was to be applied. So you will 
have to look at it in that way. The background, as 
a matter of course — because the word itself im- 
plies it, and the disturbance that is here noted and the 
alienation that is expressed find their meaning in 
that — of the whole business is sin. If there had 
been no sin, undoubtedly the relation would have 
continued. He still would have been the First-Born 
of the whole creation and the Head of the Church, 
because the Church would then have been composed 
of all whom he made. There would have been no 
alteration in that ; but for the rest there would have 
been no need of death, for death would have had no 
place there. There would have been no need of a 
resurrection from the dead, because where there was 
no death there could be no resurrection. But sin (no 
use to stop to inquire how it came. The fact was 
what Paul dealt with. He did not indulge in specu- 
lation as to its origin ; he stops with what was the pat- 
ent fact in the case) entered into the world by man, 
and it entered through the transgression of the first 
man. What lay back of that he didn't trouble him- 
self to inquire, but stops within the range of the his- 
toric record. Sin by man entered into the world, 
and death by sin. Sin with him was not a philo- 



fc)2 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

sophical idea, not a matter of evolution. It does 
not come out of conditions and necessities of our 
finite nature. There is no reason in heaven or on 
earth why a finite nature should sin because it is 
finite. It may fulfill all its purposes, as God pro- 
posed, even though it does not measure up to the God- 
head. There are none of these things to account 
for it. It is simply the bald, bare fact that sin, the 
worst thing in the universe, has laid its hand upon 
the race as a whole and upon every individual of 
the race, and has left its stain upon the understand- 
ing and upon the conscience, and has twisted and 
perverted the whole course of life, individual, social, 
racial, and national, and brought into degeneration 
and contempt all which God pronounced good. Un- 
der the domination of sin the evils have multiplied 
day after day, year after year, and age after age, 
until we can fling upon the canvas of our thought 
the darkest picture that ever was drawn, as outlined 
by this man in the Epistle to the Romans, without 
one line of relief to the whole. It is the blackest, 
worst thing conceivable. It is worse than hell, for 
it created hell. That is the thing that is in Paul's 
mind. He never makes any apology for it, for it is 
absolutely without excuse. He says of men: "They 
might have known God, his eternal power and God- 
head at least ; but they became vain in their imagina- 
tion, and their foolish hearts were darkened so that 
they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 93 

the likeness of corruptible man, and four-footed 
beasts, and creeping things." He says that they were 
without excuse; they might have known, if they 
didn't know; they had the knowledge in reach and 
the faculty of, or the attainment of, knowledge. 
They would not know, and therefore God gave them 
over to their own lust. They did not like to retain 
God in their knowledge, therefore he gave them over 
to passions of desire and shame. The awful picture 
is put down in the blackest colors that man could 
mix, and the world is made to> see in that representa- 
tion just what it is in the light of God's righteous- 
ness. That is the one thing we have to keep always 
in mind. 

May I stop for a moment and indulge in a prac- 
tical observation ? In these last days, with our easy- 
going Christianity, we have lost sight of sin and 
are dealing with men as though they were not sin- 
ners and treating them as though, without repent- 
ance and without the redemption and efficacy of 
the cross of Christ, they were entitled to all the 
benefits of the kingdom of God. But sin is there. 
Men may cover it and hide it, but they are alien- 
ated from God because of the ignorance that is in 
them, the blindness of their hearts. The trouble 
with the world to-day is that it has no sense of 
sin. It will test itself by any law but God's own. 
It will try itself by any line but the plumb line 
of divine righteousness. But, after all, when it 



94 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

comes to the final settlement and decision, it is God's 
law and God's righteousness and God's person re- 
vealed in Jesus Christ that alone shall form the stand- 
ard of judgment. And men will be tested by that. 
They may take the conventionalisms of business, the 
laws of social life, the opinions of the public, the 
legal decisions of the courts, the determinations of 
the legislatures, and everything they please, and 
say: "Before all these I stand guiltless." That is not 
the question. That does not constitute the matter of 
sin. What is your relation to the infinitely righteous 
and holy God ? You have to answer him, and sin is 
against God. "Against thee, thee only, have I 
sinned, and done this evil in thy sight." Young gen- 
tlemen, if ever you go out to preach this gospel of 
ours, don't let men deceive themselves at that vital 
point. For Christ's sake, if you want to save them, 
make them see and know what their immediate re- 
lation to God is. You have to come to that view of 
it which was in the mind of the apostle. And upon 
that he proceeds to tell what the facts are. In the 
Epistle to the Romans he has made the longest state- 
ment about it that we have on record. He dealt with 
it more at large there than anywhere else. The Jew 
had been claiming exemption from the penalty of 
sin, even though he acknowledged that he had com- 
mitted sin, according to Paul's view of it, and Paul 
referred him to his own law. First of all, by the 
law you will get knowledge of sin. You have tried 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 95 

to keep the law ; you did not do it and, what is more, 
you cannot do it. It is not simply that you are in- 
disposed to do it. He gives another view of the case, 
another that is the most awful record of a soul's ex- 
perience. It is written in the seventh chapter of 
the Epistle to the Romans, where he places himself 
face to face, with all frankness, with God's law, and 
says : "I have done my best to keep it ; but I have 
not done so, was not able to do so. It reached far- 
ther than I thought. The more I endeavored to 
comply with its requirements, the less able I found 
myself to do it. I have done my best, and I could 
not do it; and I know you cannot do it, for by the 
works of the law shall no flesh be justified before 
God. You who were pleading your own righteous- 
ness, miserable thing as it is, broken and stunned by 
shams and evil relations, corrupt undertakings, plead- 
ing your own righteousness in his presence, know 
this: the righteousness of the law, even as that is 
given in literal terms, cannot be fulfilled as God 
would have it by any man on the face of the earth. 
It is out of the question." He tells us sin has got 
that grip in you. You have lost your hold upon God, 
and, left to yourself, you are helpless and hopeless. 
You cannot devise any law that has any semblance 
of righteousness and uprightness about it to which 
you can conform. If a law could have been given 
that would have given life, righteousness would 
have been by the law. He emphatically says that 



g6 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

God would have used that. He would not have 
given this awful sacrifice when it was unneces- 
sary. 

But the legal aspect must be thrown out of the 
question. There stands over against it, all the time, 
this fearful fact of sin, rendering men perfectly and 
absolutely powerless, and leaving them hopeless in 
the presence of God for all eternity. So he says in 
the third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: 
"What things soever the law saith, it saith to them 
who are under the law." He has just written a 
long, strong indictment against the Jew — not the 
Gentile only — that he has culled from various parts 
of their Old Testament scriptures, sacred to them as 
the very word of God, however little we may esteem 
it. And he has written it out in large terms. Your 
law says this : "Now we know that what things soever 
the law saith, it saith [not to outsiders, but] to them 
who are under the law: that every mouth may be 
stopped, and all the world may become guilty before 
God." There he leaves them standing, and men have 
got to come to the realization of that before they can 
have any notion of what redemption means. There 
is no use to speak peace where there is no peace. It is 
not worth while tO 1 salve over the heart and say : "It is 
not fatal. You will get over it by and by." It is not 
worth while to make the way easy and tell men that 
they can glide along smoothly, according to the course 
of this world, and by and by they will find themselves, 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 97 

without special effort or struggle or pain, landed in 
the kingdom of God. The whole world is guilty be- 
fore God, and he is not going to revoke his pro- 
nouncement of guilt until the redemptive power and 
processes have intervened between man and God. So 
he proceeds : "Now apart from the law [without any 
regard to it whatever; leave it out of the question; it 
has done its work; it was left you in this helpless 
and hopeless condition; you cannot do anything 
with it; throw it off; get rid of it — without law] 
a righteousness of God hath been manifested, being 
witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the 
righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ 
unto all them that believe" — all of them. Sin shall 
not stand in the way when it comes to that end. This 
fact puts man in a new relation to God. The essential 
and fundamental fact of sin is that it makes God a 
liar. Man denies God's claim, denies God's right- 
eousness/and puts him in a false attitude. But now, 
when a man comes back and says, "I believe God, 
that it is as he says, it shall be as he has said," he 
comes into an attitude in which it is possible for God 
to teach him through faith in Jesus Christ. The ob- 
ject of that faith you will consider by and by and 
see how it is adjusted to the peculiar need and con- 
dition of man. "Through faith in Jesus Christ unto 
all them that believe." There is no difference be- 
tween men in this regard, for all have sinned and 
have come short of the glory of God. And if they are 
7 



98 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

justified, they must be "justified freely by his grace 
through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: 
whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation 
through faith in his blood, to declare his right- 
eousness for the remission of sins that are past, 
through the forbearance of God." That is, sins 
for which the law could make no provision, for 
which men could have found no remission under 
the law. The trouble was, the law could make pro- 
vision only for what we would account mere surface 
offenses not having the nature of sin in them. They 
were minor offenses of the mere ritual order. But 
there was no provision for the remission of the sin 
of a man who murdered his neighbor or committed 
adultery or stole. There was no provision for the 
remission of any sin against the decalogue. If a 
man blasphemed God, he was to be put to death. 
David could not have gone to the priest and said: 
"I have sinned against God. Offer sacrifices for 
me." The priest would have said: "No; there is 
no sacrifice provided for your sin. The death pen- 
alty has been pronounced against you. I cannot 
help you." It was a prophet that said : "The Lord 
hath forgiven thy sin." And it was just as Paul 
said. God's righteousness was shown in the re- 
mission of sins, through the forbearance of God. 
That is not all. It is for the demonstration of his 
righteousness in this present time that he might be 
now just or righteous and the justifier of him that 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 99 

now believeth in Jesus. There you have Paul's 
whole statement on the atonement. 

You see at the first glance that the four great terms 
of our gospel are in the statement. There is first the 
generic term "redemption," that covers the whole 
thing and all the processes. Then there are two an- 
tagonistic terms, "the righteousness of God" and 
"the remission of sin," things that can never be 
brought together by any human device, and that can 
be reconciled only by some process that must find 
its beginning in the mind and heart of God. Then 
there is the divine provision, the reconciling element 
and term of "propitiation;" and there you have the 
whole. The underlying, cementing, and binding 
feature of the whole is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ 
died, and the blood of Jesus Christ, through faith 
in his blood, constitutes the main element of pro- 
pitiation. 

I need not say that I have no sort of sympathy with 
the theology of our times, for that tries to wipe the 
blood out of the new covenant and leave us without 
that divine provision for our access to God. Men get 
very sentimental and very humane when it comes to 
dealing with God's affairs ; but they have not, how- 
ever, the same kind of forbearance when it comes 
to human affairs. They will let men kill each other 
and die for each other, and sometimes commend 
them for it. But if God comes in and says, "There 
is only one way to save a man. The wages of sin 



ioo The Life and Mind of Paul. 

is death, and the penalty must be paid. The man 
must have his wages. He must die, and the only 
way for him to die is by the death and in the death 
of Jesus Christ/' they say it cannot be so. But 
there is nothing else ; and if you blot the blood out, 
and take away the death, and tear down the cross, 
and wipe out all that record, that dreadful record 
of pain, agony, and shame, you leave us nothing 
upon which to build our hope. That is the last ref- 
uge of the sinner; and if the remission of sins is not 
found through the blood of Jesus Christ, it will be 
found nowhere in God's universe. 

Well, what is the secret of this fact? I do not 
know that I need say any more about that than Paul 
said. He said some other things — many things are 
said — and you have to include them all under this 
generic term "redemption" before you can get a 
full conception of this process that was in his mind. 
He omitted nothing that touched at any point his 
own experience, and beyond that he would not go. 
No matter what others said, he had nothing to do 
with that. "I have talked with Christ ; I have seen 
him ; I have felt the touch of his hand ; I know the 
virtue of his blood; I have stood by the cross; I 
have died with Christ, and live, not I, but Christ 
liveth in me. I know what it means to me. I 
have no theory for you to accept, and I accept no 
other man's theory. But here are the facts in the 
case. By the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 101 

through faith in his blood, the sins of everyone 
that believeth in him are remitted, and he is entitled 
from thenceforth to all benefit that has been brought 
to the world by the person and the work and passion 
and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. If 
I should propound any theory, it would be a theory 
of what you may call identification. When Christ 
died, I died. If one die for all, then I die." It was 
not his death alone. Look how he stands here, as 
this apostle in Colossians tells you. All things con- 
sist in him. You have not any life apart from him. 
What comes to pass when he dies? His death 
throws the pall over everything. Its deep darkness 
shadows the universe. The darkness that fell on 
the earth when the sun withdrew its light on that 
awful day was but a feeble type of the horror of 
great darkness that struck the heart of the world. 
But the fact was that when he went down to the 
grave he buried humanity with himself. Its only 
hope of recovery was in an acceptance of that death 
as its own, and then the resurrection with him. 

I will read again from Colossians. To show you 
how closely Paul identifies the believer with Jesus 
Christ, take the second chapter : "As ye have there- 
fore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in 
him : rooted and built up in him, and established in 
the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding there- 
in with thanksgiving. . . . For in him dwelleth all 
the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are 



102 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

complete in him, which is the Head of all principal- 
ity and power." Not apart from him ; you have not 
any life away from him. He is the "Head of all 
principality and power, ... in whom [here is the 
point where you find Paul taking hold of Christ's 
individual life and claiming every transaction in 
that life as his own and that of the Church which 
believes in him] also ye are circumcised with the cir- 
cumcision made without hands, in putting off the 
body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of 
Christ." That is where your circumcision comes 
in — circumcision of the heart and spirit — and not in 
the letter. "In whom also ye are . . . buried with 
him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him 
through the faith of the operation of God, who hath 
raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in 
your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath 
he quickened together with him, having forgiven 
you all trespasses." And then he goes on and sums 
it all up in one wonderful passage in the first four 
verses of the third chapter: "If ye then be risen with 
Christ, seek those things which are above, where 
Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your 
affection on things above, not on things on the 
earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with 
Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall 
appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory." 
He binds us up, to use an Old Testament expres- 
sion, in the bundle of life with Jesus Christ, so that 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 103 

whatever happened to him happens to us. We have 
no independent life. Paul has asserted that he has 
none. "I am crucified with Christ; I am dead. I 
have no life of my own. I am alive, it is true, but 
it is Christ within me; and even the life which I 
live in the flesh, this outward life of relation and 
labor, I live by the faith of [not by] the Son of God, 
who loved me, and gave himself for me." 

The point of view must not be overlooked — the 
motive, the meaning of it. There is a feeling, per- 
fectly natural, in view of the effect of sin, that, 
somehow or other, God has been antagonistic to man, 
an enemy, and that he has to be drawn down some- 
how, by some sacrifice that shall appease him. Men 
talk that way (I have no doubt that they feel that 
way, because of the consciousness of sinfulness), 
but that is not the way Paul talks or our Scriptures 
anywhere talk. John writes, and it is written in 
the history of the Church so that the world may 
read it: "God so loved the world, that he gave his 
only-begotten Son." The prime motive of the whole 
thing was God's love. He didn't want the world to 
perish, and he has given every indication and proof of 
it. He spared not his own Son, but delivered him up 
for us all ; and it is upon that ground that Paul so em- 
phatically in the Epistle to the Ephesians insists upon 
the fact that we are saved by grace, that it is all of 
grace ; that the thing did not originate with man. It 
could not have had its origin in human thought, in 



104 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

human experience, in human history, but it had its 
origin in the mind of God. His longing for men, his 
desire, as the Psalmist expresses it, unto the work of 
his own hand, would not let him sit silent in the suf- 
ficiency of his own Godhead and leave the creatures 
whom he had made in his own image, with the possi- 
bility of becoming his sons, to perish, and perish for- 
ever. If they can be saved, he will save them. The 
Son consents to the sacrifice, and God spares not his 
own Son, but delivers him up to every stroke and 
pang, humiliation and torture, and shame and death 
— delivers him up for us all. You have to go back to 
this standing point: it is the most marvelous thing 
that ever entered into human thought ; it is a thing 
not to be dealt with lightly or thought of as a matter 
of indifference. Do not let it become a matter of 
mere customary acceptance, a matter of creed. It is a 
shame even to repeat, as we do Sunday after Sunday, 
in cold, lifeless tones, the awful statement: "Who 
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, 
and buried." No more terrible statement was ever 
sounded out in God's universe ; and yet, as a matter 
of course, we repeat it with hearts untouched, our 
lips cold and untremulous. But that is the fact. We 
have the agony of a God as the basis of the whole 
transaction — his longing to save men. And to save 
them he pours out of the fullness of his own heart a 
perfect love, such as only he can show. It is exhibit- 
ed in the agony of his Son, who is dearer to him than 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 105 

his Godhead. He spares him not, and lets the 
world know by that sacrifice what his estimate of sin 
is and what is the cure for men who are the victims 
and subjects of sin. He comes with this tremendous 
provision out of the fullness of his grace, out of the 
fountains of his love. Here he has exhausted his 
resources, and now bids the world come and take 
all that it needs for salvation — only believe in him. 
If you look on that cross as Paul saw it, as the 
shadow of the throne, as the last revelation of that 
heart of God, as the last expression of absolute sub- 
mission to divine will on the part of the Son of God ; 
if you look on it as he felt it, as the only thing that 
the world needed in order to recover itself from the 
horror and domination of sin — if you look on it in 
that light, you have the theme for your ministry, 
you have the motive for your life, and you have got 
the cleansing power of it, the anticipation, the assur- 
ance of a heaven that will be all the broader because 
of the radiance that streams out from that tragedy 
of the ages and now appears as the Lamb as it had 
been slain, standing with the right of eternal life and 
rule, in the presence of the throne itself, and taking 
the book of life and of destiny and of dominion out 
of the hand of him that sits upon the throne. 



LECTURE VI. 

Mr. James Martineau, the most brilliant repre- 
sentative of Unitarianism in the last generation, 
speaks somewhat sneeringly of what he calls "docu- 
mentary religion." His alternative is what I suppose 
we might call the intuitive faith. He admits no au- 
thority, refuses to submit himself to precedent or 
scripture — the man himself must discover and shape 
his own religion. The Roman Catholic view sets 
tradition alongside of the Scriptures as of equal, if 
not greater, authority; and it has been the policy of 
that Church for ages past to refuse the Scriptures 
to the common people, and to compel them to rely 
upon what the priesthood may tell them. Protestant- 
ism in our day, freer and larger than either intuition 
or tradition, accepts the authoritative utterance of 
the record we have, and makes it the final appeal in 
all matters of religious faith and practice. As a 
matter of course, we of this day and of the Metho- 
dist persuasion hold to the Protestant view. We 
have thrown off, it is true, some of the superstitions, 
I might call them, that attach to the old faith in the 
Scriptures, and treat them with a freer hand and 
view them in larger relations than formerly; but, 
nevertheless, they constitute for us to-day, as always 
through Protestant history, the final court of appeal 
when questions are to be decided that affect the life 
,(io6) ; 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 107 

and faith of the Church as well as of individual be- 
lievers. It is well known to what tradition first led. 
It was valuable during the life of the first genera- 
tion of Christians. They could tell from their own 
observations and immediate associations with the 
apostolic life, and with the life of the Lord himself, 
what the facts were and what the teachings were 
with a degree of certainty and clearness that left 
nothing to be desired. As a matter of fact, outside 
of the apostolic record which we have here, the 
Scriptures, and the Gospels particularly, are made up 
of traditional accounts. They are thoroughly trust- 
worthy, because they came from men on the spot — 
witnesses of sense, men of honest minds — who had 
themselves been enlightened by the Holy Spirit and 
to whom the promise of the Spirit to bring all things 
to their remembrance and to show them the things 
of Christ had been fulfilled. But as the years passed 
and this old generation died away, it is perfectly well 
known how the tradition became polluted and cor- 
rupted. After two or three generations, the first 
tradition was absolutely lost or so utterly perverted 
that it gave entirely different meanings to the utter- 
ances of our Lord and of the apostles, and by and 
by they began to forge traditions. The Church of 
Rome to-day is built largely upon false traditions 
that were crystallized in support of theories that 
will not hold in the face of the freedom and power 
of our gospel. 



io8 The Life and Mind of PauL 

It is true that the apostle uses the word "tradi- 
tion" more than once in his writings ; but he was in 
reach of the Lord's life, and the traditions to which 
he referred were all of a well-authenticated charac- 
ter. But the weight of authority with the apostles 
themselves attached, first of all, to the documentary 
record of the Old Testament. As the years passed 
on and Christianity loomed larger in the estimation 
of the people, the New Testament record attained, 
first, equal value with the Old, and then, at last, larg- 
er value; it became the final authority. At the last 
they came to combine the two and to regard the in- 
terpretation of the Old by the New as settling all the 
questions of difficulty that arose. 

Now we have to note some things about the Paul- 
ine record, the apostolic record, to which he is the 
largest contributor, thirteen of the Epistles being as- 
signed to him where there are four or five, or half a 
dozen, given to other apostolic writers. In his rec- 
ord there is noted, first of all, a characteristic blend- 
ing of liberty for the individual with apostolic au- 
thority. He writes to the Corinthians, "Not that we 
would have dominion over your faith, but are help- 
ers of your joy;" while he writes to the Galatians: 
"If any man preach any other gospel than I preach, 
let him be accursed." He never had the slightest 
doubt as to the things he himself preached or wrote. 
He never hesitated in his utterance. It is clear, dis- 
tinct, and final; and he knows perfectly well that it 



The Life and Mind of PauL 109 

is the only gospel for the world. At the same time 
he intends that that gospel shall not be binding be- 
cause it has come by apostolic authority, but accord- 
ing to his own saying he made, by manifestation of 
the truth, his appeal to every man's conscience in 
the sight of God. In other words, "It is not worth 
while for me to give you upon my authority any 
truth or all truth. I know it to be true, and I am 
content to abide by it, live and die by it, and stand in 
judgment by it at the last ; but you must know it as 
I do, or it is of no value to you." It is not to be a 
matter of inheritance or tradition or authority as far 
as you are concerned, except of that highest by 
which a man is bound when he feels that his con- 
science is held, that this truth should be accepted at 
your hands. So he blends the two, and undoubted- 
ly, to my mind, that is the true point of view. He 
reasoned and argued with the people upon that ba- 
sis. He never attempted to hold them by authority 
or any right he might have as leader or command- 
er of the people. The only authority he recognized 
in the case as final was that of his Lord. His own, 
as an apostle, might be sufficient for the regulation 
of Church affairs, the direction of matters concern- 
ing the conduct of life; but even in these things he 
refers to the Church as the rightful director. When 
he came to the higher and more intimate concerns 
that were involved in the man's more intimate rela- 
tion to God, he taught that the man must settle 



no The Life and Mind of Paul. 

them in his direct converse with God himself and by 
the process of his own conscience. It was not intui- 
tion that he magnified ; it was revelation to the con- 
science. And he was simply carrying out our Lord's 
own teaching. He declared that his Church should 
be builded upon that; the foundation was laid by 
Peter. "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to 
thee [not human authority — you might almost read 
it, 'not even mine' — made this revelation], but my 
Father which is in heaven;" and he added: "Upon 
this rock I will build my Church." And he made the 
permanence, perpetuity, eternal life of the Church 
to depend upon the actual acceptance of the divine 
revelation by the individual conscience and mind of 
the man. You see how it stands with our personal 
responsibility, a thing to which appeal is made per- 
petually ; he will not allow one class to rule the oth- 
er in matters of such sort. If Jew and Gentile come 
together, there must be a modus vivendi between 
them ; but you must never let the Gentile liberty of 
conscience make naught of the Jewish restrictions, 
nor must you allow the Jew, with his narrow view 
of things, to judge the Gentile in his freedom. Ev- 
ery man to his own master standeth or f alleth ; and 
to this he holds the Church and every member of 
it and' the world. This is a view that has hardly 
prevailed, and prevails only under certain limita- 
tions and restrictions even at this day. There are 
men, of course, outside of the requirements and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. in 

characters of the gospel, who plead for the largest 
liberty. They do it in the interest of license, not of 
liberty. But within the Church of God, the genu- 
ine Church of God, there is a tendency to lean upon 
authority, on the one side, and a disposition to ex- 
ercise authority, on the other, which is anti-apos- 
tolic, interferes seriously with the personal accounta- 
bility of the man, and threatens the truer, more genu- 
ine, and deeper spiritual life and Christian experience 
of the Church itself. Now you can read the apos- 
tolic record in the light of what I have said. At 
some points the authority is decisive and incisive. 
Paul does not hesitate, where a matter of sin is con- 
cerned, to use the whole weight of his authority to 
deliver the Church from its corruption and evil. 
He does not hesitate to give direction as to the right 
relations between men in the Church and between 
the Church and those who are its guides and leaders. 
He does not hesitate to point out what is the requisite 
for the maintenance of the true manner of life in the 
face of the Gentile world about them. In all these 
things he speaks in a tone of authority that is not 
to be disguised. And he does not want to disguise 
it ; but when he comes to those deeper and more vital 
elements of Christian faith and Christian character, 
he puts the truth before them. But he tells them 
that it must make its own appeal to their conscience, 
and that they have to settle this the final question be- 
tween themselves and their God. All this is summed 



ii2 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

up in one brief, pregnant sentence : "No man can say 
that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost." 

I think that if we would read the apostolic Epistles 
with that thought in view, we should probably get a 
better understanding of many parts of them. There 
is a mechanical way, you know, of reading the 
Scriptures. We use them as we would use a text- 
book in arithmetic — this is the rule, and you cannot 
depart from it without falling into error that will 
upset all your calculations. But you cannot read the 
Scriptures that way. It is scripture that is given by 
men — freemen — who have themselves, by distinct 
processes of revelation, brought into the light a 
knowledge of God ; and it is read by men who are 
themselves standing in the same attitude before God 
and in the same relation to him that these apostles 
themselves do. They don't allow any distinction to 
be made between them and other men because of 
their high functions and great offices. They are 
upon the same level with all Christian believers and 
with all men as they stand before God; and they 
do not intend that any plea shall be made in their 
behalf by men who do not occupy their position, 
upon the ground that they are not to be held to this 
high responsibility. They intend that all men shall 
stand upon precisely the same footing and be judged 
by the same law and meet the same tests. "Every 
one that heareth these words of mine, apostle or 
priest or layman or whoever he may be, and doeth 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 113 

them is safe enough. Every one that heareth and 
doeth not is lost." The Master repeated this time 
and again, and Paul made use of it just as he would 
have done to his own conscience and upon the basis 
of his own experience. 

Another thing you may note about his Epistles: 
for the most part they are what would be called oc- 
casional. They were not labored treatises and es- 
says drawn up for the perpetual use of the Church, 
though they served that purpose. The apostle had 
in mind the concrete cases that were brought to his 
attention, and was addressing himself to the imme- 
diate need and immediate circumstances of the 
Church in question. Most of his letters — his larger 
letters — were addressed to Churches that he himself 
had founded, directly or indirectly, and the others to 
those who were personally identified with him or as- 
sociated with him in his work. But when it comes 
to the reason for his communications, you will find 
it stated in almost every instance precisely and dis- 
tinctly; and it is a matter of some contention that 
has arisen, some fault that has shown itself, some 
great truth that is in danger of being perverted 
and has to be asserted or vindicated, or some need 
of the Church that has to be supplied by a special 
provision. Taking them in the order in which they 
come (and, by the way, it is well worth while to 
look back to a book that is now perhaps old but very 
ingenious and instructive even if you do not accept 
8 



ii4 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

its main contention, Bernard's "Progress of Doc- 
trine in the New Testament," in which he attempts 
to show that the present order of the Epistles as we 
have them is providentially given and serves better 
the purpose of the Church than if the chronological 
order had been followed), it is generally understood 
that the Epistles to the Thessalonians were written 
first. As we have them in our New Testament, the 
Epistle to the Romans stands first. It is perhaps an 
advantage in this regard at least, that it gives us the 
broadest view of the actual content and direction and 
issue of the Christian faith that is contained in any 
of the Epistles or, I might say, in all of them put 
together. So that, with this general outline and, in 
some points, detailed statement of the great essen- 
tials of our faith, we start upon our reading of all 
the apostolic records, and can refer back to it in con- 
nection with all the others. You take that first 
Epistle, for example. After its assertion of his own 
apostleship and what it means, it lays down as its 
main proposition that the gospel of Jesus Christ was 
given in its completeness and fullness to the Gentile 
world. The Jew would have said that he would give 
the gospel to the Gentile, but he cannot have it to 
the same extent and with the same fullness. "It is 
ours by divine covenant, and the Gentile can come 
only as an outer-court worshiper and take the crumbs 
as they fall from the table." Paul says : "No ; they 
take it upon precisely the same terms that you do, 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 115 

and with perfect equality with yourself." The first 
eight chapters are given to the demonstration of 
that proposition. It comes by a process that is open 
to all men, comes under the terms of a covenant 
that includes all men — the covenant with Abraham. 
The law came in as a restriction because of trans- 
gressions. The faith in the Christ who has come 
more than meets all the demands of the law, and 
makes it possible for the Gentile world to get as 
large benefit from God's revelation and God's cove- 
nant as the sons of Israel could, so that the apostle 
can with great emphasis affirm: "When I come to 
you, I shall come in the fullness of the blessing of 
Christ." 

His next contention in the Epistle is that this is en- 
tirely compatible with the covenant to Israel. He 
reconciles his freedom of the gospel for the Gentiles 
with the old covenant, points out the essential fea- 
tures and characteristics of that, and refers it back to 
God's choice. He has the right to make any choice 
that he pleases. His sovereignty is involved, and 
Paul goes through that tremendous argument until 
it reaches into spheres of life and thought that no 
man can compass, and he is compelled to wind up 
with his great outbreak : "How unsearchable are his 
judgments, and his ways past rinding out!" Then 
come the particular directions that are necessary for 
the maintenance and illustration of the Christian life 
and the modus Vivendi between Jew and Gentile, in 



n6 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters, winding up 
with his recognition of his personal friends at 
Rome and his salutations to them. When you look 
into that Epistle in its detail, you have the largest 
body of divinity that ever was written. There are 
whole libraries included in almost every chapter, 
and there are a reach of thought and depth of per- 
sonal experience and an outlook into eternal things 
not surpassed by any writing of any apostle or any 
man in any time. Yet when you come to look at the 
Epistle to the Ephesians, the tone of controversy 
there has passed away; the Pauline contention has 
been sustained ; the Gentile Church looms up as the 
largest in God's plan, it promises to be world-wide, 
and it has the elements of permanency and perpetui- 
ty in it that the Jewish Church never had and could 
not have. So it is simply a statement; it is not a 
controversial statement at all, but it is a statement in 
distinct, emphatic terms, and as you read them they 
seem to be larger promises even than are used in the 
Epistle to the Romans. They are full ; they are vast ; 
they reach back into eternity. The apostle opens 
with his splendid benediction: "Blessed be the God 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath 
blessed us [both Gentiles and Jews] with all spir- 
itual blessings in heavenly places in Christ : accord- 
ing as he hath chosen us in him before the founda- 
tion of the world, that we should be holy and with- 
out blame before him in love : having predestinated 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 117 

us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to 
himself." So he goes on. He starts with God and 
goes back into the eternity of God, and tracks the 
movement of the divine purpose and divine thought 
until it lights upon man as man, not Jew, not Gen- 
tile, and as widely as humanity will allow. "He 
hath chosen us that we should be holy and without 
blame before him." The highest aims that the mind 
of God can conceive are cherished for humanity, and 
the highest relations possible to any creatures of 
God are determined for us — the adoption of sons 
unto himself by Jesus Christ. And Paul continues 
his elaboration of that thought in terms that make 
you feel as though the roof of the old Mamertine 
prison had been raised, and the floodgates from the 
eternal worlds had been opened, and the streams of 
life and blessing had flowed down until the very at- 
mosphere about him was radiant with the light and 
glory of God in Jesus Christ. That has come to us 
as an apostolic record. Shall we leave that aside 
and trust to intuition or tradition ? 

If you come to the Epistle to the Corinthians, the 
first Epistle, the evident occasion of it was a matter 
that touched the apostle's heart and troubled him 
profoundly — a matter of schisms in the Church. 
We do not mind such small things as that. We can 
take them and not be bothered about them. Let 
men quarrel. They are saintly and good; it is all 
right; they belong to the Church. But they were 



n8 The Life and Mind of Paul 

very serious things with Paul, and he spoke very 
plainly about them. He says they do not belong to 
the kingdom of God at all. "If you indulge in these 
things, you are walking simply as men — men of the 
world." The old Authorized Text and Version says 
you are "carnal ;" the Revised Version has "men" — 
you are just men; that is all there is of you; you do 
not belong to the saintly order. It would be wise, I 
think, that in this last day we should pay some heed 
to apostolic direction in matters of that sort, and 
we should be saved a great many of the failures and 
calamities that destroy us and that hurt the Church 
and hinder its work. Until you get a Church united 
in its one principle and devotion to the Son of God, 
you will never have a Church fully equipped for 
the work God wants it to do. Every ebullition of 
anger, every outbreak of strife, every show of envy, 
every movement of ambition is a break into the uni- 
ty, a destruction of the integrity of the Church itself, 
and as such is fatal to its full and complete success. 
Paul was fighting against that. These Corinthian 
people seemed to have a genius for that sort of 
thing. Well, for the most part they had felt all 
their lives the yoke, been under bondage, for the 
great part of the Church was made up of slaves ; and 
when this touch of God was upon them and they felt 
the liberating power of this new life, it was a very 
natural experience that they should assert them- 
selves. And when they began to assert themselves, 



The Life and Mind of Paul, 119 

they would assert themselves against each other. 
They had not yet the elements of union, the bond of 
union, perfected in them, and the old antagonisms 
would take new forms. They would array them- 
selves under different heads and leaders, and mag- 
nify men instead of God— Paul, Apollos, and Cephas 
— and even dare to make Christ a party leader and 
bring him into the partisanships of the Church. 
Paul resented that most keenly, as he resented his 
own association with any such feeling and practices ; 
and so he protests against it with an energy and a 
vigor that have not lost their force as the years have 
gone by. There is nothing more emphatic than 
those first three or four chapters of First Corinthi- 
ans — his protest against all undue glorification of 
men and alignment of men under different leaders 
for the magnifying of any one man or any one par- 
ty. He winds that up practically with the marvelous 
word that shows how little, petty, and mean all their 
strifes and contentions are: "What do you mean by 
this sort of thing? You want men only. Why, 
all things are yours — Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the 
world, life, death, things present, things to come — 
all are yours. Why should you be bothering about 
these different ministers with their different gifts? 
The whole body of them belongs to you. Rake 
them in and take them and hold them as your right, 
but never strive after this fashion." 

Then the vices that had crept in, undoubtedly in 



120 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

some part as a result of this freedom that the gospel 
had brought, allusions to which we find frankly 
here and there in the apostle's writings, demanded 
attention. They seemed to think they were free to 
do as they pleased, and were guilty of sins that or- 
dinary decent men in the mere secular circles would 
not have descended to. With all the intenseness of 
the apostle he denounces them, and says: "Get rid 
of them at any cost; cut out this corrupt leaven/' 
He emphasizes the unity of the body of Christ- 
brings out the true character of it. It would be 
well if in this day we could apprehend, as undoubt- 
edly the apostle did, the force, the reality of this 
spiritual union. It is largely a vague imagining. 
We generally look upon it as nothing more than a 
symbol in the way of speech. I think one of our 
failures to get at the real power and meaning of 
the atonement is due to the fact that we have never 
yet been able to enter into that mystic conception 
which dominates the mind of the apostle Paul. 
Mere fleshly relationships are light things with him ; 
but when it comes to spiritual ties, they are real. 
The Church is a body ; it has one Head. The same 
life flows from that Head through all the members. 
Not a member has an independent life; each has 
his own function, discharges it according to the 
divine order and requirement and place in the body, 
but discharges it for the benefit of the whole. The 
whole, moreover, is concerned as to the way in 



The Life and Mind of Paul, 121 

which this function is discharged. The lame, 
bruised, broken, or hurt member brings out the 
consciousness of hurt to the whole body. Paul em- 
phasizes it, gives long paragraphs about it, and 
pleads with them for the recognition of this abso- 
lute unity of the Church as one body, because it has 
one Head and because it has been made to drink into 
one Spirit. It is not a matter of convenience, not a 
matter of companionship, fitness to enter into asso- 
ciation with people like yourself; it is not a matter 
of literary culture and all that sort of thing. The 
social test and secular aims and social purposes of 
your common life do not enter in here. You have 
a higher relationship and truer union ; you are bound 
together in one actual and spiritual life. How it 
reaches and how closely it binds men together only 
God can tell us. We feel the effect of it in part. 
When we shall know as we are known, then we 
shall understand that by our dullness and stupidity 
and blindness we have lost largely some of the best 
gifts of God. We talk about it and put it in our 
creed — "I believe in . . . the communion of 
saints" — and go out and commune with each other, 
just as men of the world do, without any saintliness 
about it, without any consciousness of higher rela- 
tionship than pertains to our mere fleshly kinship 
and association. But Paul had something more than 
that in view. It was for that reason that he paid 
no attention to distinctions of class. If a man was 



122 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

in Christ, there was the saintly bond ; there was the 
spiritual tie, stronger and more enduring than any 
that earth could knit. He wanted the Church to rec- 
ognize that fact and maintain its unity in the bond of 
peace. 

Then there are just two things more in that 
First Epistle to the Corinthians that bear the apos- 
tolic stamp and reach into the highest latitudes of 
Christian experience and Christian life. You have 
that wonderful lyric, unsurpassed by any work of 
genius in any age, the loftiest song that was ever 
sung by Christian lips, in the thirteenth chapter, that 
wonderful lyric on love. When you have learned 
that, you have learned the whole secret of your 
gospel. But it takes a vast amount of spiritual un- 
derstanding and revelation by the Spirit to get at 
the bottom and meaning of it. Then, with perhaps 
a further help, as the result of such a life as the 
thirteenth chapter indicates, the apostle brings out 
that wonderful argument on the resurrection. That 
settles the question for all time. No plea of science 
on its low, material ground, no question of skep- 
ticism, and no argument of the dread and fear of 
our humanity can ever weaken for an instant at any 
point the mighty force of that appeal, as well as ar- 
gument, for the resurrection, which rests just on 
this: If Christ be not raised from the dead, then 
there is no resurrection, and our preaching is vain — 
that is, of no effect, powerless — and your faith is 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 123 

vain, empty ; empty of contents ; you have nothing to 
believe. Your whole range of belief depends upon 
this fact, that Christ is risen from the dead. And if 
Christ be risen, he is only the first fruits. God does 
not intend that those that are in Christ shall be lost, 
blotted out of being; he is going to raise them up 
with Christ, as he has identified them with Christ in 
all the processes and trials and trainings of this life. 
The argument presses itself home upon the con- 
science and upon the heart. Take it and read it, 
just where we are wont to read some passages of it, 
by the side of the casket or at the open grave, wher 
the house is empty and the light has gone out and joy 
has fled. Take it and read it then; and by and 
by you will find the darkness breaking, you will 
find joy returning, and there will be an exultant 
lift out of the inner conditions of mere earthly life. 
You will find yourself in the heavenly places with 
him with an assurance that cannot be broken, that 
when this "earthly house of our tabernacle be dis- 
solved, we have a building from God, a house not 
made with hands, eternal in the heavens." What 
should we do without that apostolic record? What 
can the world find to make up for the loss of it? 
There it stands and will stand as the exultant out- 
break of Christian faith and Christian experience un- 
til the last note of time shall be sounded : "O death, 
where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 
The sting of death is sin ; and the strength of sin is 



124 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us 
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 

The Second Corinthians deals in part with, and 
I suppose was occasioned by, the cause of the man 
who had been expelled from the communion because 
of his vicious doings. This man had become repent- 
ant, and they did not know exactly what they should 
do with him — whether to restore him or, because 
of the grave nature of his offense, to keep him out 
of the Christian communion for all time. It is 
wonderful to note the gentleness and tenderness 
with which Paul deals with even such a case as that. 
"We should be very slow to act; we should want 
long probation; put him to the test; let him wait." 
"No," said Paul, "you may overburden the man. 
You will break his heart, and it will not do. You 
will bring too much sorrow upon him. Receive 
him, restore him." Isn't it a wonder that this rigid 
disciplinarian, who hated sin as he hated hell, would 
stand up in behalf of a man that had been so stained 
and polluted, and would, when this man broke down 
under the consciousness of his sin and applied for 
pardon, reach out his hand and, with apostolic au- 
thority, say, "Thy sins be forgiven thee; take him 
back into the Church?" He then goes on with va- 
rious admonitions and warnings in the concluding 
part of the Epistle against the Judaism of the teach- 
ers who threatened to undo his work with their as- 
sertion of the legal claim upon the general body. He 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 125 

is bitter against them. He goes through the whole 
gamut of emotion. He is now a man ; he is not writ- 
ing officially, but his heart is in it all ; and now and 
then there is an expression that shows how the heat 
is kindled within him, and he makes clear that he 
is not going to take quietly things that ought to stir 
men, even men of this world. 

But I shall call attention to only one of the great 
Epistles besides these I have named, the Epistle 
to the Colossians; and that is the one that is much 
alike, in its statements and wording, to the Epistle 
to the Ephesians, written with more distinctness and 
widely different, yet with much of precisely the 
same material. Its evident purpose is, as I have 
said before, to put Christ in his place in God's 
kingdom; it is a sort of an essay upon Christ, It 
is brilliant, it is profound, it is far-reaching. As a 
philosophy it includes all the possible sides and 
forms of human thinking; as a religion there is not 
an element in the religious life that is not touched 
by it; as a rule of life it throws you back into such 
close union and fellowship with the Master himself 
as that you have his experience and power of life 
for your direction. As against all the absurd claims 
of the heathen philosophies, the gnosticism that was 
creeping into the Church in these later days of apos- 
tolic history, it asserts the absolute sufficiency and 
unqualified fullness of our gospel to meet every 
possible demand of our human nature. You are 



126 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

complete, filled out in him. You do not want any- 
thing* else. Never mind your aeons; never mind 
your philosophic speculations; never mind anything 
Jewish or heathen — your feast days and holy days 
and Sabbath days — brought in to supplement or to 
fill out what may seem to be very meager and in- 
sufficient in the gospel. If you have Christ, you 
have all — all that is possible to man or angel, all 
that is possible this side of the throne of God. 
There is nothing else for you ; you are complete in 
him, for in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom 
and knowledge, and in him dwelleth all the fullness 
of the Godhead bodily, so that you do not have to 
look anywhere else to find anything of God. It 
comes out in his person and in his work. All 
questions are settled by it, and by it you are pre- 
pared for the innermost secret of the divine life. 
"Christ in you, the hope of glory : whom we preach, 
warning every man, and teaching every man in all 
wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in 
Christ Jesus." Not a man here and there, such as 
the old mysteries of heathenism selected, but every 
man — bring him unto Christ, and we will furnish 
him with all wisdom and set him perfect before God. 
Finally, the Epistles to Timothy, to Titus, and to 
Philemon, upon which I cannot dwell. I want only 
to note one or two personal features. If I should 
characterize the apostle Paul in modern terms, in 
his personal aspect, I should say that he was the 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 127 

most perfect Christian gentleman that this world 
has ever known. He was direct and forceful, em- 
phatic in his speech ; but there was no man who un- 
derstood the courtesies of life more fully than he. 
There was no man that dealt with women with 
more tenderness and gentleness and courtesy than 
he. The elder women you must entreat as mothers, 
the younger women as sisters, in all purity, guard- 
ing them against any undue approach of familiari- 
ty or coarseness, holding them sacred. In his friend- 
ships (just see that list in the last chapter of the 
Epistle to the Romans) he has a word of recog- 
nition for almost every one of them. No matter 
what service he has rendered, Paul wants to be re- 
membered to him for that service. Here is Phcebe, 
here are Aquila and Priscilla, and here are his 
kinsmen, whom he names; and there are Mary and 
Andronicus and Junia, Tryphena and Tryphosa, and 
all the others who, he says, have labored with him. 
He does not forget that they wrought side by 
side and faced the horrors of the persecution and 
still kept up their labors for Christ's sake. You 
know what that bond of labor is among men, 
among Christian men and Christian women and 
Christian ministers. He recognized his fellow la- 
borers, some of them women, who had been par- 
takers with him of his toil, and he gives them their 
meed of credit and praise, and sets the apostolic 
stamp upon them, and holds them up henceforth 



128 The Life and Mind of FauL 

to the world as immortal by virtue of service ren- 
dered to God's highest messengers, for the benefit 
and behoof of the Church in all the ages to come. 
You have, I think, the finest specimen of an address 
of a Christian gentleman to another gentleman in 
that Epistle to Philemon that has ever been penned. 
He approaches the whole topic he has in hand with 
the utmost delicacy, and yet with perfect clearness 
and freedom. He does not take advantage of his 
position in that respect, but says : "I have too much 
regard for you and your rights to hold back, even 
though I need him so badly — this man that belongs 
to you by every tie, earthly and heavenly. I send 
him to you. Receive him as myself; and if he owes 
you anything, if you have lost by him, just set it 
to my account, and I will pay it." The tone in which 
it is written! We talk about the Scriptures some- 
times as though they came with thundering noise, 
crashing into the chambers of our consciences and 
consciousness. But they oftentimes come like the 
gentle zephyr; they fan you with pleasant breezes; 
they have notes of music that echo the mind of the 
Master. I think that was how Jesus dealt with men. 
If we could only hear him saying all the hard and 
harsh things that are on record as having fallen 
from his lips, and which he could not help saying, I 
think we should understand them better. There 
must have been a tear in his eye when he said : "Woe 
unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites !" There 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 129 

must have been sorrow in his heart. It broke out. 
He stood over Jerusalem and wept. It had scoffed 
at him and driven him out and threatened him with 
death, and was soon to carry its threat into effect; 
and yet he stood there with streaming eyes and 
cried out : "O that thou hadst known, even thou, in 
this thy day, the things that belonged to thy peace !" 
Paul had his Master's mind in all that. He was ten- 
der, as gentle as a mother with her child. He tells 
the Thessalonians that he had dealt with them as a 
nurse with her children. We have the man set forth : 
there is the apostle; there is the genius of Chris- 
tian thought and life; there is the mystic with 
his profound insight into spiritual and eternal 
things; and there is the great Christian statesman 
laying the foundation and framing the constitution 
of the Church for ages to come. They are all 
there. There is the disciplinarian with his intense 
hatred of sin and everything of that sort, and 
there is the man dealing with his children as a 
mother with her children, the brother dealing with 
his sister, the friend dealing with his friend. Ev- 
erything that goes to make up the perfect manhood 
wrought in the image of his Lord you find sketched 
out, brought out in plain, unmistakable lines, in 
these Epistles. I do not really know any manual 
better worth carrying with you in all the depart- 
ments of life than these Epistles of this man Paul, 
an apostle of Jesus Christ, the slave of Jesus Christ. 
9 



LECTURE VII. 

« In our biblical reading and studies we are very 
likely to pass condemnation without qualification 
upon that early class of Christians known to us as 
Jewish Christians — men who were adherents to the 
law, who thought it was a necessity that the law 
should be observed in order to obtain salvation. 
Faith in Christ did not with them supersede the re- 
quirements of the law. We think of them oftentimes 
simply as obstructionists, deal with them as antag- 
onistic to the apostle, and give them no credit for 
what was undoubtedly at the bottom of the thought 
of the better part of them — a sincere and earnest de- 
sire to maintain the morality that was known to 
them through the law. As a matter of fact, you 
must remember through what the Jews passed. 
There had been but one guard against the corrup- 
tions and immoralities that deluged and destroyed 
the world, and that guard these men knew as the law. 
That had been the hedge about Israel, and they insist- 
ed that it should be observed. Paul said "No" em- 
phatically (and it was a vital question, though they 
did not see it) ; the law must be set aside; "Christ 
is the end of the law for righteousness to every one 
that believeth ;" there must be perfect freedom from 
that old yoke of bondage. The gospel in Jesus 

(*3°) 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 131 

Christ is sufficient, amply sufficient, to meet all the 
demands that God makes upon men, whereas the 
law has utterly failed to accomplish its purpose. 
The strife was continued for a long time, and 
brought out all the vigor and energy of the apostle's 
intellect as well as of his heart. You know in what 
terms he wrote in the Epistle to the Galatians, and 
how in the Epistle to the Romans he repels the in- 
timation that grace is simply liberty to sin, and 
holds faith as the one security against the corrup- 
tions of the world. He held, as did the apostle John, 
that the victory that overcometh the world is our 
faith. That gives you a conception of ethics which 
is not common to the world. We are as much in- 
clined to the old Judaic requirement of law as they 
were, and are perpetually trying to make men right- 
eous by law, insisting that they must be brought un- 
der restraint and held down by precept and con- 
trolling power. Paul says: "No; you will never 
get men to be righteous in that way. If you want 
to reach the highest level of ethical life, you have 
to do it through the inner power of the spiritual 
lif e/^ And he shifts the whole question of ethical 
character and responsibility, just as his Master did, 
from the law to Christ himself. He elaborated what 
Jesus had said : "If I had not come and spoken unto 
them, they had not had sin ; the law itself could not 
have condemned them." In that marvelous seventh 
chapter of Romans Paul brings out the utter im- 



132 The Life and Mind of Paid. 

potency of the law in the case of any man to se- 
cure the righteousness which the man's conscience 
tells him is a necessity in the sight of God, and 
without which he can never be at peace with himself. 
You remember how he closes that great statement 
with the expression of his utter wretchedness and 
hopelessness and cry for deliverance, "O wretched 
man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body 
of this death?" and then his one and sufficient an- 
swer : "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." 
Now, that is the best of Paul's ethics. They are 
not legal. Understand that. He insists upon that; 
he will not look upon the question as a legal one. 
The law gave the knowledge of sin in the first place ; 
it stirred the conscience by its very contradictions 
and antagonisms, but it never made a man right- 
eous. It is very true, and a thing to be remembered, 
too, that that old law started with the recognition 
of the one God ("I am the Liord thy God"), and 
based all its requirements upon their obligations to 
him. Jesus Christ set even that aside, saying: "If 
I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not 
had sin." He puts himself in the place of God at 
the head of all ethical requirement, and makes it 
obligatory just in the proportion in which the man 
is related to him. You do not find many ethical 
books written upon that basis, and you do not find 
ethical teaching very thoroughly given upon that 
ground. For the most part, we have the whole le- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 133 

gal argument. We plead authority of the law, ne- 
cessity for a clean life, the obligation to do good to 
your neighbor, but we do not root it in Christ; and 
the starting point of all ethical life with the apostle 
Paul is Jesus Christ. "If any man be in Christ, he is 
a new creature : old things are passed away ; behold, 
all things are become new." And it is within the 
sphere of that new creation, and there alone, that 
you can find the ethical requirement of God met, 
satisfied. We have to look at it from that point of 
view if we look at it with Paul's eyes; and if you 
look through his writings (I do not want to read 
all these passages to you, though they are well 
worth your most careful study — passages in Gala- 
tians, Ephesians, Colossians particularly, and in 
Romans also), you will find that he throws men 
back for all these excellencies in human character 
and conduct immediately upon their relations to Je- 
sus Christ. For example, take the broad conception 
in the sixth chapter of Romans, where this old Jew- 
ish idea was interposed as an objection to this doc- 
trine of grace. Paul says: "Shall we sin, because 
we are not under the law, but under grace? God 
forbid. How shall we that are dead to sin live 
any longer therein? Know ye not that so many of 
us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized 
into his death ?" So he goes on to the point : "Reck- 
on yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive 
unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord." The 



134 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

argument proceeds upon that ground — the inner 
change wrought in the man in virtue of his death in 
and with Christ unto sin, and the use of all his 
members as instruments of righteousness unto holi- 
ness. 

If you turn to the Epistle to the Galatians, you 
will find that he brings substantially the same ap- 
peal to the front. He tells them that they are not 
to walk after the flesh; the law could not avail them 
anything. They had utterly failed under the law; 
the Jews themselves had failed, and the only hope 
for them was an inner principle and power. It must 
begin within, and not come from without. As he 
had written to the Romans, "The law of the Spirit 
of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the 
law of sin and death ;" and, "If you walk in the Spir- 
it, you will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Here are 
the works of the flesh; they are manifest. And he 
enumerates them and gives them at length in all their 
hideousness, one by one, and declares that those 
who do those things shall not inherit the kingdom of 
God. There is as high a plane of uprightness and 
excellence to be found here as ever was dreamed of 
in the law; but it is the fruit of the Spirit, its nat- 
ural outgrowth and outcome, not by mechanical 
processes fostered and cherished and shown in open 
life — the fruit of the Spirit, not fruits. It is a sin- 
gle, indivisible thing. "The fruit of the Spirit is 
love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, kindness, 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 135 

faith, meekness, temperance. Against such there is 
no law." But the law never provided for these 
things except in the way of an outward order, "You 
must be thus and must do thus," but never told them 
how. When you come to the new teaching of 
grace, you approach the question from the other side. 
The law does not come there; but Christ sets him- 
self before you, puts himself in you and puts you 
in him, and you become conformed to his image, 
and then the whole thing comes out as a natural 
product. This matter has been an occasion of dis- 
pute with a good many, Luther particularly; for, 
you remember, he saw a radical contradiction, as he 
thought, between Paul and James. He did not like 
James's Epistle, because it did not lay stress enough 
upon faith. He counted it a mere Epistle of straw, 
setting it aside. But, after all, Paul and James 
were in absolute agreement. James puts you upon 
the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and tells you that 
the man that looks into the law and does not keep it 
is going to fail in his life and in his character. But 
what law? Not the old law. He could not have 
styled that the perfect law of liberty, for it was any- 
thing else ; it was a law of bondage, a yoke put upon 
them. "But whoso looketh into the perfect law of 
liberty, . . . being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer 
of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." 
Or, if you take it in the other way, he puts it as the 
royal law : "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 



136 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

That is his law, and obedience is required there as 
Christ required it and as Paul required it. But it 
is an obedience that springs from an inner source. 
It is not a hard effort of mere duty to comply with 
an outer requirement and a precept that is impossi- 
ble to put as a restraint upon men, but it is the glad 
and free exhibition of the mind of the man toward 
his Lord and his longing to be like him and con- 
formed to him in all things. Paul never reached a 
higher level, nor has man ever thought in loftier 
terms, than when he said, "Be ye imitators of God 
as dear children;" and that is a sort of thing that 
is simply impossible under any law that can be 
framed in human speech. 

Now if you will consider the matter from that 
point of view you will see, first of all, that this is 
the ethical requirement for the Church of Jesus 
Christ. Paul says: "What have I to do to judge 
them that are without ? What I do is to teach them 
that are within." It is the law of the kingdom of 
God. The main point that he insists upon, as you 
will find by looking into the Epistle to the Ephe- 
sians, and as I have indicated to you in some of my 
former statements, was the perfect unity, the one- 
ness of conviction of thought and of life in the 
Church of God. He aims, first of all, at those de- 
partures from the spirit of Jesus Christ which tend 
to sunder the ties that bind believers together. I 
will read you a verse or two from the fourth chap- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 137 

ter of the Epistle to the Ephesians that is pertinent 
here: "That ye henceforth walk not as other Gen- 
tiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, having the 
understanding darkened, being alienated from the 
life of God through the ignorance that is in them, 
because of the blindness of their heart: who being 
past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciv- 
iousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. 
But ye have not so learned Christ; if so be that ye 
have heard him, and have been taught by him, as 
the truth is in Jesus : that ye put off concerning the 
former conversation the old man, which is corrupt 
according to the deceitful lusts ; and be renewed in 
the spirit of your mind ; and that ye put on the new 
man, which after God is created in righteousness and 
true holiness." The negation of the Gentile life is 
translated into positive renewal of the spiritual and 
intellectual life which is to be clothed upon with the 
new man shaped after the image of God. This se- 
cures the unity of the Church, and is the answer to 
the exhortation of the first three verses of the chap- 
ter: "I therefore . . . beseech you that ye 
walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, 
with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, 
forbearing one another in love ; endeavoring to keep 
the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." 

His ethical system, you see, was a very compre- 
hensive one. It was not that the man should simply 
regard himself, try to keep himself clean, think 



138 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

right thoughts, and do right things without re- 
spect to what others might think and feel, but that 
he must bind himself by the ties and obligations that 
naturally grow out of his relation to the body of 
Christ, the Church. He must take the whole thing 
into account; he had no business to think of himself 
alone. At the very basis of it there was an exclu- 
sion of that which many theological writers have 
brought forward as of the very essence of sin, self- 
consciousness, forbearing one another and forgiving 
one another, endeavoring to keep the unity of the 
Spirit, admitting nothing that would divide you 
from one another. You cannot be indifferent to one 
another ; you cannot be antagonistic to one another ; 
you cannot dream of any harm to another; you can- 
not indulge in malice, bitterness, or anything of that 
sort without sinning against God. It is worth much 
to know that you have a plan of ethical life here that 
is infinitely more delicate and infinitely higher, I 
dare say, than that which is expressed in the nega- 
tive terms of the old law. It is not simply that you 
shall not do this evil thing, but you have to come into 
a very positive and very tender and gentle relation 
with everybody that stands on the same plane of 
life in Christ with yourself, keeping the unity of 
the Spirit by forbearance, gentleness, kindness, love. 
It rests there. It is not a question of personal right 
upon which men make their ethical systems, secu- 
lar ethical systems, to rest. It is not a question sim- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 139 

ply of obligations growing out of the natural rela- 
tions between us here. With the apostolic mind 
these things are just so many means of securing or 
illustrating the end that Christ himself has in view. 
First of all is the relation to him, the obligation to 
be conformed to his mind, to his life; and then the 
relation to all men as they are related to him. It is 
a broader echo and statement of that wonderful 
word of the Son of God : "Inasmuch as ye have done 
it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye 
have done it unto me. . . . Inasmuch as ye did 
it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to 
me." He sweeps out every consideration of selfish- 
ness and puts away from the possibilities of mind 
and life the petty resentments and low passions and 
the malice and envy that so often disturb Christian 
communities and even break up households. Writ- 
ing to the Corinthians, Paul says of their wounding 
the weak consciences of the brethren by their in- 
dulgence in forbidden appetites, "So doing, you sin 
against Christ ;" and that is the essence of the whole 
evil. 

Of course when you come to what you might 
consider the more practical side of it, the considera- 
tion of the grosser offenses which we regard as im- 
moral, they are put out of the question; he dis- 
missed them with a brief, curt comment. If you 
have been stealing, don't steal; work that you may 
have something to give to others, and not simply 



140 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

for your own advantage; do not indulge in lying; 
put away lying, and speak truth with your neighbor. 
And when you come to that emphatic, wonderful 
expression of Christian life that he gives in Colos- 
sians, "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those 
things which are above," he follows it immediately 
with "mortify/' put to death, your members which 
are upon the earth, all the passions and appetites 
that dishonor the Gentile world. You have nothing 
to do with them; you have come into Christ; your 
life is in him; you have risen with him; you have 
gone into another atmosphere; these things do not 
belong there, and cannot live there. John in his 
way put it in another form in his first Epistle, "He 
that is born of God sinneth not" — cannot sin, be- 
cause his seed remaineth in him. He has the ele- 
ment of the new life in him, and it is impossible 
that these two should coalesce. They are incongru- 
ous and incompatible, and you cannot set them in the 
limit and range of the same life; and the man who 
indulges them willfully is sinning against Christ. 

I said awhile ago that the ethical requirement 
of the Pauline system was infinitely more delicate 
and of a higher and more definite sort than any 
dreamed of under the law. You should put the 
New Testament alongside of the Old, and you can 
see the difference immediately. The Old Testa- 
ment in its highest reach gives you very vigorous 
and very earnest denunciations of sins in their worst 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 141 

forms, but it touches more on the outward aspect 
of them. Occasionally you find an anticipatory 
statement in the prophets. You find a word that 
looks ahead and lets you know that the time is com- 
ing when there will be deeper search into hearts than 
men have been accustomed to in accordance with the 
covenant by which the old law is to be done away. 
"I will put my law into their minds, and write it 
upon their hearts." But nowhere in the Old Testa- 
ment do you find any such delicate shades of mean- 
ing given to ethical life as you will find in these won- 
derful statements of the apostle, and as you will 
find as the ages go on, expanding and coming into 
clearer expression in the life of those who have en- 
tered deeply into his mind and have studied most 
thoroughly his teachings. He does not stop with 
the mere immoralities of life or even its unmorali- 
ties, you might say; he does not satisfy himself 
with showing the incongruity of these with the 
character of Christ and the man's relation to Christ, 
but there is not a side or element of our human life 
that he does not take up and bring into direct rela- 
tion to Jesus Christ and interpret in the life of 
Christ. Take the family life. He tells you what 
the man and his wife must be together, and in such 
tones and terms as never were heard even from the 
lips of the "Sweet Singer of Israel," with his lofty 
conception as he has expressed it in one or two of 
the Psalms ; and that relationship has been since the 



142 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

apostolic day tenderer and sweeter and a more ex- 
quisite thing than it ever was in human history be- 
fore. It has a quality of morality higher and di- 
viner, because it roots itself directly according to 
apostolic teaching in that relation of Christ to his 
Church, which constitutes the standard and type of 
all relationships so intimate and so dear as those 
that exist in the household and the family. You 
never found anything like that in the Old Testa- 
ment teaching, clear and strong as it may be on all 
these points. When you come here, the thing is 
transfigured, the new creation has come out, the 
light has shone on it that never shone before. The 
Son of Man has come and set himself at the very 
heart and head of the household, and says: "You 
have to regulate everything that belongs to the 
household from this point of view; I am the Lord 
and Master here." It is in the light of this truth 
that we get back and interpret so much of the 
Lord's life as is recorded in the Gospels in his in- 
tercourse with men and households, Mary, Martha, 
and Lazarus. The whole home idea comes out 
there, not because we know so much about those sis- 
ters and their brother, but we know this: that it 
was one of the favorite resting places of the Son of 
God, and his presence there made it such a house- 
hold as God intended should be found here in earth. 
All that now is transfigured, broadened out. You 
may have nothing for the home but four bare walls 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 143 

and the husband and the wife or, it may be, a child ; 
but it has been hallowed by that word, and it has 
sanctity and purity about it that no other relation in 
earth has. Paul has put his ethical stamp on it. He 
has gone into the social life too; friendships be- 
tween men become dearer and sweeter as they are 
touched by his pen. I referred you yesterday to that 
last chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. If you 
will look through it carefully, you will see how the 
work that they have done, the communion they have 
had with each other, the fellowship in suffering, and 
all these various things that constitute the ties that 
bind men together have been touched and elevated 
and purified by their common fellowship with their 
Lord, and made the bond and ground of friend- 
ships and of social relationships such as never was 
known on earth before. Thus it goes through the 
whole scale of social life. There is no side of it 
that has not been touched and hallowed by apostolic 
teaching and the gospel that comes with it. If you 
go into business, there is one thing he is not going to 
endure. You may go into business and be as busy 
as you please ("not slothful in business"), but you 
cannot carry covetousness into it. The man that is 
covetous he rebukes in Ephesians as an idolater. In 
the Epistle to the Galatians, as in Colossians, he 
also says covetousness is idolatry, and men of this 
sort cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven; there 
is no place there for them. In this way he gets at 



144 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

the root of every business transaction. What is the 
spirit of it? What is the meaning of the transac- 
tion? Are you simply gratifying your own greed 
of gain, trying to get advantage of your neighbor in 
the trade, in the business deal? Is it only a matter 
to expand your own resources, so you can better 
command and control the markets ? Is it this indom- 
itable and unalterable sort of covetousness that con- 
trols you? If it is, you have no part or lot in this 
matter, and you may understand it at once. It is 
not worth while to put on the form of faith and call 
him "Lord, Lord !" It is not worth while to shape 
your life on the Lord's day for the decorous require- 
ments of the day and the services in his house. None 
of these things count if that evil is there at the bot- 
tom of your transactions during the week ; you have 
no part or lot in these things. The covetous man 
is an idolater, and that is one thing above all others 
that God hates and will not tolerate. It is the basis 
and ground of all sin, the root of all evil; and it is 
because men have become idolaters that he has de- 
livered them over to their passions of dishonor and 
their lusts, to work out their own ruin. Paul goes 
right to the heart of your business. He has no ob- 
jection to a man's growing rich if he can do it in 
honor and with regard for his relations to Christ in 
the method and spirit of his transactions. He has 
no objection to the zeal and diligence which men 
show in the active life of this world. But he objects 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 145 

with no uncertain terms to that sort of business that 
is absolutely indifferent to the interest and concerns 
of others, and merely seeks to aggrandize itself and 
to make gain without any regard to what it may cost 
the helpless and the poor about them and the men, 
his neighbors, with whom he professes to be deal- 
ing honorably. Covetousness is idolatry, the filthi- 
est and foulest thing that ever disgraced God's earth. 

Go to childhood; he is taking the same attitude 
there that our Lord did. Jesus took them up in his 
arms and blessed them and said, "Of such is the 
kingdom of heaven;" and Paul tells the parents: 
"You have these children as a sacred charge and 
trust, and you have to be careful in your dealings 
with them. Do not provoke them to wrath ; do not 
deal hardly and harshly with them. They are God's 
household; they belong to the kingdom of heaven, 
and the sacred things of that kingdom are not to 
be dealt with after the blunt and hard and unfeel- 
ing ways of this mere secular life. You must get 
Christ's point of view and deal with them as he 
would deal with them." After this manner he goes 
through the entire range of life. There is nothing 
left untouched in it that is essential to the main- 
tenance of human society, that is required for the on- 
ward movements of the highest civilization, so that 
it may culminate in the everlasting kingdom of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

Now, we can put another meaning upon ethics, 
10 



146 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

We have our legal restrictions, and we say these 
things are necessary and we could not get along 
without them. Paul says this : ''The law is good if 
a man use it lawfully, knowing that the law was 
made for those that do not know Christ, the ungodly 
and the profane. You cannot do anything with them 
except under the compulsion of the law and under 
the whip and spur of judgment. You have to deal 
with them after that way, but that is not to be 
brought into the kingdom of God. It is a shame 
for you to go to law with your brother, even though 
your cause be just. You go to law, and that before 
unbelievers? You had better be defrauded and 
suffer wrong. Why? Because there is a break at 
once in the continuity of the Church's life, the uni- 
ty of the life. You have set yourself in antagonism 
to your brother, and that is worse than any loss you 
may suffer through or from him." See how he 
puts it, with no qualification at all. He speaks out 
directly, plainly, sharply, denouncing it as an offense 
against Christ and the Church of Christ. We have 
not any secular opinion of ethics like that, and we 
have not tried to cultivate any such fine conceptions 
of the high moral life as that. We have rather been 
disposed to take our view of things from the social 
life about us — what other men are doing. We think 
theirs is the model, and that we must conform to the 
ordinary requirements of the secular life if we want 
to live in the world of men. Paul says: "No; you 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 147 

are living in the kingdom of God. You must not 
bring any of your disturbing elements into it. You 
are living as members of the body of Christ. You 
must not bring any of your corruptions or nervous 
disorders into it ; leave the body sound in its integri- 
ty, unhurt by any of these passions and evil designs. 
You must not bring into the range of the Church's 
life [and that covers the whole life of every believer 
in Christ] any of the things that Christ has specif- 
ically declared to be against his will and which are 
yet common among men.'' Paul tells you that you 
have to get your standard of life, the power by 
which you live, the model of your life, not from any- 
where in this world. He does once say, "Be ye imi- 
tators of me/' or, "Imitate me as I imitate Christ," 
but no further. He says you cannot get your stand- 
ard or model of life from any of these sources, but 
you must get it from on high, from Christ, from 
your relation to him. Everything is to be tested by 
its congruity or incongruity with his character and 
with that relation which you sustain in fellowship 
with him. 

Now, the main point with me in all this is that 
it is wrought out, not as mere principles of train- 
ing, but as the individual result of faith in Christ. 
He makes faith the ground of righteousness. It is 
not simply the ground of our justification that we 
get, but it is the ground of righteousness, which 
works, he says, and works by love ; and love, he de- 



148 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

clares, is the fulfilling of the law. When you have 
loved your neighbor you have met all the require- 
ments of the law, because that is absolutely incon- 
sistent with any of the things that may be hurtful 
to your neighbor. At the bottom of it is the faith 
which constitutes the leading feature of the gospel. 
That is why the gospel is open to all the world — 
because faith is possible to any man and every man 
everywhere, so that it becomes possible for all the 
world to get away from the law and the evil con- 
ditions of an immoral life, and come up to the purer 
air of the kingdom of God. By faith you can do 
it, but not otherwise. The ethical thus stands iden- 
tified with the religious life, and you cannot sep- 
arate them. The old Romish notion that held the 
religious apart from the secular life, and set an im- 
passable barrier between the two, is at profound and 
eternal variance and contradiction with Christ's own 
word and with the Pauline teachings. "Holding 
faith, and a good conscience; which some having 
put away concerning faith have made shipwreck." 
You cannot hold on to your faith if you abandon 
the morals of your life. The ethical quality of the 
gospel is just as necessary to salvation as the reli- 
gious side of it, and both come out of the same 
source — faith in God and faith in Jesus Christ our 
Lord. That is what I understand by Pauline eth- 
ics. They are essentially religious. They come to 
us with the stamp of Christ upon them, not the legal 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 149 

stamp. They come to us as an expression of the 
freedom with which Christ has made us free. They 
are the natural and normal expressions of the spir- 
it that Christ has put in us. They are the illustra- 
tion and exhibition of the new creation which comes 
out when a man is in Christ Jesus, so that the whole 
life is bound up together. You cannot be a very re- 
ligious man Sunday morning at church and go out 
the next day and cheat your neighbor or lie to him 
or show your covetousness in your transactions with 
him. Paul says that is absurd. If you are in Christ 
to-day, you will be in Christ to-morrow. If you are 
not in him to-morrow, you were not in him to-day ; 
your faith is a sham. You are trying to live by 
works; you are putting on the outward form of god- 
liness, but do not know the power of it and the 
necessities and demands that your faith shall bring 
these fruits and exhibit itself in that sort of life 
which is absolutely correspondent to the life of the 
Master himself and all its workings. As he put it 
in that sentence I read awhile ago: "Walk worthy 
of the vocation wherewith ye are called." Whatever 
is not worthy of that vocation and does not corre- 
spond with it is to be set aside as unworthy of you 
and as a hindrance to your entrance into the king- 
dom of God; and if not forsaken and thrown aside, 
it is a forfeiture of your whole claim to religious 
character and to your place in Christ. We take the 
whole of our life henceforth from that center — 



150 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

that one radiant point which shines into all the dark 
places of our experience and history, points us ex- 
actly the way that we should go, and at all times 
gives us assurance that the Lord is true to his prom- 
ise : "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, 
ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto 
you." That assurance fixes your relation to God and 
your possession of all that God can impart to you. 



LECTURE VIII. 

The Epistle to the Colossians, first chapter, be- 
ginning- at the ninth verse : "For this cause we also, 
since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for 
you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the 
knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual 
understanding ["in all spiritual wisdom and under- 
standing;" the word "spiritual" ought to come first] ; 
that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all 
pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and in- 
creasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened 
with all might, according to his glorious power, unto 
all patience and long-suffering with joyfulness ; giv- 
ing thanks unto the Father, which hath made us 
meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints 
in light." 

This is one of those matchless prayers of the 
apostle Paul to which you can find no parallel in the 
literatures of earth, and the only one that will stand 
above them is that great intercessory prayer of our 
Lord in the Gospel of John. Condensed as they are, 
they comprise within themselves whole volumes, li- 
braries of theology, and generations of Christian ex- 
perience. It is simply impossible to exhaust them. 
Nor can we do more than touch the outline of the 
apostolic thought. It takes more of spiritual under- 

(i5i); 



152 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

standing to fathom the depths of apostolic experi- 
ence than it does of intellect to sound the profound- 
est depths of genius in the world. And this is per- 
haps, in some aspects of it, the most comprehensive 
of all his prayers. There is perhaps a loftier reach 
of expression in that wonderful prayer for the Ephe- 
sians, "I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heav- 
en and earth is named," and so on ; but the breadth 
and depth of this prayer for the Colossians are not 
surpassed even by that wonderful utterance, and in 
no other passage, even of Paul's writings, is there 
anything that will compare with it. 

If you look at it in detail, first of all, and as hav- 
ing its bearing upon all the rest, there is the prayer 
for knowledge — "that ye might be filled with the 
knowledge of his will." It is hardly necessary to 
say to an audience that has any acquaintance with 
the apostolic writings that Paul was the deadly foe 
of ignorance, and that the one great aim of all his 
writings and teachings was to instruct the people, to 
cause them to know. He had the conviction that it 
was possible for every believer in Jesus Christ to 
have knowledge of that, at least, which was best 
and highest — a conviction which, I am sorry to say, 
is not shared by a majority of the believers of the 
present day; the most of them are content to remain 
upon a very low level of knowledge. But the apos- 
tle was pressing the matter of their getting knowl- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 153 

edge on all occasions. No writer in the New Testa- 
ment used the word "know" more frequently than 
he did, and he used it not as a synonym or as having 
possessed the same meaning as the term used in the 
schools of the world ; for you will remember that he 
was rather scornful of the pretensions to knowledge 
that were put forth by the men who were the lead- 
ers of the world's thought in his time, and I suppose 
he would have had somewhat of the same scorn for 
the pretensions that are put forth in our day. What 
he meant was a knowledge that grew out of, first, a 
revelation, and then a discerning and broadening 
experience. He did not consider that a man knew 
anything until it had entered into his very nature, 
become a vital part of him. 

Take, for example, that great passage in the Epis- 
tle to the Philippians where he declares his wish and 
purpose for himself: "That I may know him, and 
the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship 
of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his 
death." The knowledge of those things is not to be 
attained from the schools nor from the books. No 
man can lecture them into the understanding and 
appreciation of the multitude. They belong to a 
range of topics and to a form of life which can be 
entered into only by the way of personal experi- 
ence. "That I may know him!" I know a man 
sometimes, but how do I know him? You can tell 
me all that you know about him, and if I have not 



154 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

seen him and come into personal converse with him, 
I still know nothing about him ; and if I ever really 
know him, I have to come into the intimacies of life 
with him and get some unforeseen revelations from 
him — disclosures from himself that he may never 
have intended to make. That is what Paul meant 
when he talked about knowing him. He is not to 
be known in any other way but by direct personal 
knowledge. You may read the Scriptures until the 
day of your death, and the veil is still over him ; you 
may search all the critical writers, and they can give 
you every detail of that which is written about him, 
and you may still be as profoundly ignorant of him 
as when you commenced. To know him is to come 
into personal converse with him and enter into the 
experiences of his life, his death, his resurrection; 
then you will know something about him. It is in 
that way that Paul uses the term "to know," and he 
does not use the term that is commonly used for 
what is called scientific knowledge. He has a 
stronger word, more intense, one that has greater 
fullness and meaning and greater accuracy, that 
you may know thoroughly — really know. 

You will note, too, that when he talks about knowl- 
edge in this way he gives you at least an intimation 
of what is to be its content : "That ye may be filled 
with the knowledge of his will." That is the broad- 
est subject that ever a man undertook to know about 
— God's will. He does not mean simply his will in 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 155 

regard to your personal life just here and now, but, 
as is always the case with him, when he gets a man 
within the kingdom of God he relates him imme- 
diately to all its interests and to its farthest reach. 
He takes the whole scope of his activities and their 
issues, and expects the man somehow to come into 
harmonious relation with them all; and that can be 
only by knowing the will that is to give beginning, 
shape, and ending to it all. That is his will that 
covers this universe of ours, that goes beyond the 
reach of science and beyond the depths of philosoph- 
ic research. There is nothing within the range of 
mere intellect that can fathom this vast abyss, the 
will of God. He who stood first among men and 
had the profoundest realization of what was possi- 
ble to human nature and what God meant for our 
human nature said, with a distinctness and empha- 
sis that are not to be misunderstood, and said it so 
that men might realize that it applied to them as well 
as to him, "My meat and drink is to do the will 
of him that sent me, and to finish his work;" and, 
"These that do the will of God are my brethren and 
sisters" — they hold the relationships to me that 
earth cannot furnish. Paul had the largest under- 
standing, I doubt not, of that will of God in all its 
breadth and in all its applications to the various con- 
ditions of life, here and hereafter, to be found 
among men. His thought and the energy of his life 
were concentrated upon it. To know — that was the 



156 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

highest achievement for him, and it was the largest 
attainment possible for those for whom he wrote, 
and yet it was evidently a possible thing for them. 
They were common people like ourselves. They 
were not so well trained as we are. The slaves of 
Corinth and the half-barbarous classes of Asia Mi- 
nor, to whom he ministered, were not people of high 
culture and great intellectual attainment; they were 
the commonest of the common people. And yet he 
takes it for granted that they are capable of reaching 
such heights and sounding such depths as these. 

Talk to our people about these things. They will 
tell you that they are too high, and they set aside 
this book and all the teachings of Paul upon these 
things as fit only for a few exceptional cases, but not 
suitable for the masses of the people. I should like 
to know why Paul wrote in such terms to the com- 
mon people then. He was not a man to waste his 
time and energy uselessly and fruitlessly, where he 
knew he could have no result. He understood per- 
fectly well that when a man came within the touch 
of God he was made capable of realizing infinitely 
more than the schools could teach him or than he 
could learn from any of the experiences of secular 
life. To know the will of God, the highest knowl- 
edge of earth, is possible to every man that dares to 
believe absolutely in Jesus Christ. That is why he 
makes the prayer for them. His whole system of 
things, in all its details; our narrow life as believ- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 157 

ers in Jesus Christ and our low level of interests — ■ 
all these things are included within the scope of the 
operation of God's will. And when we have the 
clew to it, we can follow it out and trace it to its is- 
sue. We know what he is, and therefore we know 
what his will must be, for we have a true under- 
standing of him and the capacity to apprehend spir- 
itual things. For, after all, Paul does not rest, as 
we do, upon the intellectual side and hold that a 
man knows these things because he can make the best 
intellectual use of them. The poets, many of them, 
without much spiritual discernment, have availed 
themselves largely of these tremendous facts and 
these vital features of our Scriptures ; but I should 
not go to them to learn what Paul meant to teach. 
The philosophers have been sounding, throwing out 
their leads here and there along the course of the 
ages, and have given the results of their research; 
but I should not go to them to find out the will of 
God as Paul discloses it. You never found it there 
yet. Other busy men, with all the practical life of 
the world in their hands and before them, have 
thought that by the great plans that they formed and 
the great enterprises that they projected and the 
great expenditure and outlay of intellect and of labor 
in the wonderful schemes that have covered earth 
and seas they have met the demand and gone about 
as far as man can go in his reach and grasp of God's 
purpose and God's mind. I shall not go to them to 



158 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

learn it ; they are too narrow and too low. Not by 
any means. 

There is a wonderful expression in that Epistle 
to the Ephesians that touches this line of things: 
"That now unto the principalities and powers in the 
heavenly places might be known by the Church the 
manifold wisdom of God." I do not suppose they 
would concern themselves much with your business 
enterprises, and I think they would rather laugh at 
your philosophies and make sport of your scientific 
endeavors and their results, mere fragments and 
shards as they are of great truths. But unto these 
of the highest quality and with the clearest reaches 
of sight and insight, "unto the principalities and 
powers in the heavenly places," is made known now 
"by the Church [not apart from it] the manifold 
wisdom of God." They never care to learn it any- 
where else ; they have concentrated their search and 
investigation upon this one field for the ages past. 
Paul says that is where they are getting their educa- 
tion for the ages to come, and he has that in view. 
"Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is 
the disputer of this world? hath not God made 
foolish the wisdom of this world?" He does not 
mean that there is no wisdom for man. No; the 
princes of this world have not known God's secret, 
else they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 
But there is a channel of communication between us 
and God through which we receive the best and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 159 

deepest things of the divine nature. "Eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard [all the channels of communi- 
cation between men have utterly failed here], nei- 
ther have entered into the heart of man, the things 
which God hath prepared for them that love him. 
But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spir- 
it : for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep 
things of God." So that nothing is left out of the 
scope of our research — nothing at all. God's will 
covers the whole, and the things that God reveals to 
us by the Spirit are the deepest things of all. Paul 
himself sometimes gets staggered when he comes 
face to face with amazing revelations of that sort. 
He winds up one wonderful section in hi discussion 
of the great secrets of our gospel with that utter- 
ance : "O the depths of the riches both of the wisdom 
and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his 
judgments, and his ways past finding out !" And yet 
he dares to pray, he does not hesitate to pray, "that 
he may be filled with the knowledge of his will," aft- 
er the true sort, "in all spiritual wisdom and under- 
standing." It is not an intellectual process. If it 
depended upon that, one-half of this world, or three- 
fourths or nine-tenths of it, would never come to it ; 
we are not equal to it. I should not dare to stand 
here with a mere intellectual equipment to expound 
these things of God. I want more than that. I want 
to be able to say that God hath revealed them to me 
by his Spirit. I am telling what I know. The things 



160 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

which we have heard and seen we cannot but tell. 
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings God has 
ordained strength and wisdom. "I thank thee, O 
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast 
hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast 
revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father ; for so 
it seemed good in thy sight." 

We often turn to the men who have adorned and 
honored the various departments of human effort, its 
literature and its science, and so on; and with some 
of us occasionally there is a regret expressed that 
such men are not expending their energies in the 
search after the truth of this gospel and in its proc- 
lamation. We think what a vast amount could be 
done if the intellect of a Shakespeare or the genius 
of a Descartes or any of the great thinkers of the 
world's history could only be concentrated upon this 
one great truth. God has rarely chosen men of that 
sort. But here was a man that had an exceptional 
work to do. It was his business to bring the whole 
range of divine truth, the mysteries of the Godhead 
and of the gospel, within reach of all the people, and 
he was about the only man of his time that could 
have done it. He declares emphatically, as he comes 
to the Corinthians: "I came to you . . . not 
with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring 
unto you the testimony of God. . . . And I 
was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much 
trembling. And my speech and my preaching was 



The Life and Mind of Paid. 161 

not with enticing words [persuasive words] of 
man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit 
and of power." And it was upon that that he re- 
lied all the time. Likewise when he is praying for 
these people he falls back upon that feature of his 
own experience, "that ye may be rilled with the 
knowledge of his will, as I have been, in all spiritual 
wisdom and understanding," in the practical appli- 
cation of the diviner knowledge, in the adjust- 
ment of it and its correlation to all parts of the great 
body of which God is the center and head, and 
through which he distributes his own life, and in 
which he manifests his own wisdom — "that ye may 
be filled with the knowledge of his will" after this 
sort. "Do not go over to the old Grecian philoso- 
phies; they have exhausted themselves, and the 
world is none the better for it. Hundreds of years 
have passed since Plato spoke and Socrates discussed 
and Aristotle searched, and yet the world lies just 
where it did in its despondency and in its filth, in its 
recklessness and its hopelessness. I want you to 
know something better than that." The one thing 
needful they did not know. They did not know the 
will of God, and they could not know it; it was not 
within their reach. "But you — you have just come 
out of heathenism; you have the lowliest position in 
the community; you have never been taught any- 
thing; no universities have opened their doors to 
you, and no schools have trained you in the search 
ii 



1 62 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

for knowledge. But, nevertheless, you may be rilled 
with the knowledge of his will, the grandest and 
highest knowledge ever attained in this world; and 
you may know it, not by the processes that are im- 
possible to you, and which no school can help in us- 
ing, but by the one way by which God makes known 
his mind and will to his creatures — by the way of 
revelation through spiritual wisdom and understand- 
ing." 

That is the first theme in this great prayer just 
loosely sketched off and outlined. You can dig into 
it as profoundly as you please, and you will find 
enough to occupy you for a good while to come; 
and if you care enough for God and his will to do 
it, you will find that it will repay you. But that 
is not simply for your own delectation and advan- 
tage. If that were all, if the prayer had stopped 
there, it would be a grand thing. Man would feel 
that he had been lifted to a very high plane, that he 
had been magnified greatly, that he had become larg- 
er than he ever dreamed of being, that he had gone 
into fellowship with higher powers, that he had en- 
tered into communion with God himself; but that 
is only one side and the poorest side of it. No man 
will have these things to himself alone. He has to be 
something more than a recipient and a receptacle of 
God's truth and God's wisdom. He must show the 
worth and power of that supernatural knowledge 
by an active, fruitful life. You see what he says 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 163 

here : "That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto 
all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and 
increasing in the knowledge of God." There are 
two things to be considered : an active life of fruit- 
bearing, and consequent increase in the knowledge 
of God. I have been profoundly impressed by some 
of the expressions in the Gospels and in the Epis- 
tles. On this point our Lord said: "Every branch 
in me that beareth not fruit is cast out, withered and 
burned." It seems to be the thing that God has no 
patience with, that he will not bear — fruitlessness. 
You know that profoundly impressive statement in 
the Epistle to the Hebrews on the same line: "The 
earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft 
upon it, and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by 
whom it is dressed, receiveth blessing from God: 
but that which beareth thorns and briers [is not 
fruitful, but is simply wild and waste] is rejected, 
and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be 
burned." T do not know any more awful saying 
than that, and it declares just what God intends. He 
is giving this vast bestowment of knowledge to his 
people, with the elements and capabilities and forces 
that pertain to it, so that men may be fruitful unto 
every good work. There is nothing good to be done 
in this world but that it ought to be done and must 
be done, if done at all, by believers in Jesus Christ. 
You may talk about the advantages outside and all 
the agencies that are employed for the material bet- 



164 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

terment of men. After all, I do not see that they 
have reached the root of the matter. If you should 
search into it, you will find that the evil lies deeper 
than the surface, and that when you have made men 
clean and given them good homes and saved them 
from the degradation of poverty, you have simply 
made them capable of doing vastly more evil than 
they ever could have done in the restricted condi- 
tions of life; and the most of them avail themselves 
of the power and the opportunity. That is not what 
God provided for. He wants every man so wrought 
up in the best and highest capacities and elements of 
his nature as that he shall bring forth fruit accepta- 
ble to God, "that ye might walk worthy of God unto 
all pleasing" — pleasing to him. 

Well, you must have a good opinion of your fel- 
low men; but it is not going to save you or save 
men. The thing that we want most of all in these 
days is the realization of the fact that the better 
part of man — not that which lies on the surface; 
not that which expresses itself in fine buildings, in 
art, in all the works of taste and genius — but the bet- 
ter part of man, the higher part of him, has to be 
cared for and is most shamefully neglected. Where 
we see men of decent ordering and living in an or- 
derly way, we take it for granted that everything is 
all right with them. It will not do to take too much 
for granted. The devil can gloss over things and 
decorate them and hide the deformities and corrup- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 165 

tions of character and of life so that they are not to 
be discerned except by the all-searching eye; and 
we have to search out the needs of men at the bot- 
tom and provide for the betterment of the race in 
that respect, and then all the rest will come right of 
itself. You get a world of godly men, and you will 
have a world which God himself will decorate and 
make pure and clean and comfortable and happy; 
but until you have that you may exhaust your ma- 
terial resources, and the world is just about as bad 
as it was before or a little worse. 

The worst instances — and often, unhappily, be- 
cause they are unconscious instances — of the direct 
violation of God's will and frustration of God's 
plan are found among the men who have the largest 
control of this world's agencies and are doing what 
the world regards as its greatest work simply be- 
cause not one of them will ever think of doing his 
work with reference to the will of God or of Je- 
sus Christ. If you point them to the Master's own 
terrible saying, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one 
of the least of these, ye did it not to me," they will 
not know what you mean. They have not the un- 
derstanding. So Paul is not out of the way as an 
apostle for the Churches for all time when he makes 
prayer that they may have the highest and best 
knowledge of all (God's great will), and that it 
may be a fruitful and a practical knowledge, result- 
ing in every good work and looking to their own 



1 66 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

increase unto the knowledge of God, getting more 
and more of it. 

There is another thing. Most of us learn our 
alphabet of religion in the Sunday school, get a few 
verses of the Bible, and after that we lay it coolly 
aside, behave ourselves decently, and think that is 
all we have to do. There are multitudes of mem- 
bers of our Churches who do not know any more 
about God, have never grown into the knowledge 
of God any more than the child in its mother's 
arms, if as much. "Of such/' said the Master, "is 
the kingdom of heaven,' , and to babes these things 
are revealed. But these people do not care to know 
anything more than may serve, as they fondly hope, 
to save them from the damnation of hell and to se- 
cure them a decent and honorable place upon earth ; 
and as for the rest, they will "jump the life to 
come." But Paul never was content with that sort 
of thing. He wants the Church (and he writes it 
not only to the Colossians, but to others in the 
Church) to be continually on the increase. To- 
day's life will not do for to-morrow, and what you 
have learned of God by yesterday's and to-day's ex- 
periences is not going to satisfy you if you are as 
eager in your Christian life as you ought to be. To- 
morrow there are new issues to be faced, larger rev- 
elations of God in the ordering of his providences; 
there are greater things to be done, and they are not 
to be done by the elementary forces of Christian life 



The Life and Mind of Jr'anl. i6y 

that we command to-day. We are to get access to 
the forces and increase of the knowledge of God day 
after day, or the Church will stagnate, the world 
will sink lower, and men will die when they ought 
to live. 

Those are things worth praying for. Paul nev- 
er prayed for a little thing, and it is one of the char- 
acteristics of the man that he always reaches in his 
prayer as far as his expression can be carried. He 
uses superlatives all the time. You know how he 
closes that great prayer in the Ephesians. He has 
done his utmost in the way of thought and utter- 
ance; he has mentioned the fellowship and love of 
Christ, its breadth and length and depth and height ; 
and he has called the saints to the comprehension and 
understanding of that. And when he has said it all, 
he finds that the whole expression is very meager 
and insufficient, and so he breaks out with that mag- 
nificent passage, "Unto him that is able to do ex- 
ceeding abundantly [the strongest terms he can use] 
above all that we ask or think [you cannot in your 
thought reach God's power to bestow and to do for 
us], according to the power that worketh in us" — 
not a far-off dream of a heavenly life, but a present 
realization, because the power that does it is work- 
ing in us now. It is the same power, as that Epis- 
tle tells you, that raised Christ from the lowest 
depths of death, passed him through all ranks and 
orders of being, and never ceased the exertion of its 



1 68 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

energies until it had set him at God's right hand, in 
the highest place in the universe. That is how he 
thinks and feels and prays, and that is what he 
means to do for these common people, the converts 
to the faith of Christ ; that is what he puts into this 
prayer : "That you may know his will, walk worthy 
of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in ev- 
ery good work, and increasing." Increasing, in- 
creasing day by day! Do you know any more to- 
day than you did yesterday? If you do not, then 
"I have lost a day," as the old heathen emperor said. 
There is still another thing in Paul's mind : "That 
ye may be empowered with all strength, according 
to his glorious might, according to the might of his 
glory" — a might that befits his glory. When you 
read that, you are thinking about heroic undertak- 
ings, vast Christian enterprises that require extraor- 
dinary outlays of power; and you feel as if you were 
going to draw from the magazine of divine re- 
sources these immense impulses and these mighty 
agencies by which the world — the worlds — are to 
be shaken. No, no! That is not it. When you 
come to look at it, you will be surprised. We have 
to be strengthened, empowered with all strength, 
"according to the might of his glory unto all pa- 
tience and long-suffering with joyfulness." That 
does not sound as though it required such an extraor- 
dinary exercise of power. Well, it is a vast deal 
easier to do some great heroic act on the spur and 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 169 

under the impulse and inspiration of the moment and 
of circumstances than it is to plod along, heavily and 
wearily, through trying conditions of life, with bur- 
dens upon you and pain at your heart and longings 
unsatisfied and no open way before your eyes day 
after day, through the years of a long life. That is 
what we are required to do. I have often been most 
profoundly impressed with that single word of our 
Lord : "He that endureth to the end, the same shall 
be saved." For the most part, it is simply a matter 
of endurance. You can use one great sweep of 
power for any single act, and men will marvel at 
it; but to keep at it, even with a far less degree of 
exertion, day after day, through all the weeks of 
the years, the muscles wearing out, the nerves giv- 
ing way, the consciousness of failure pressing upon 
you every moment, while you do not know what the 
issue is going to be — it is just there and in that 
condition of life that you need this divine power 
for your strengthening. You have to keep that up. 
I have watched it in many cases. I have seen great 
things done by men in hours of special endowment, 
as it seemed, and been disposed to say with the 
others : "What a great man ! how highly honored of 
God !" Then, on the other hand, I have seen some 
poor woman, destitute of the comforts of life, la- 
boring under the pressure of sickness, alone because 
she has suffered all the bereavements of time, look- 
ing for nothing better in life than she is enduring 



170 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

day after day, and bearing it all with just what he 
says — joyfulness. There is a mightier thing there 
than the heroism of the battlefield or of any other 
sphere of effort. That is where we need the power. 
It takes God's power to do that. 

Did you ever think about that in connection with 
your Lord's incarnate life? I have often thought of 
it. It must have been the sorest trial to him, with 
his sensitive nature, with his exquisite holiness, with 
his keen discernment and thorough understanding 
of all the passions and impulses of our humanity — 
it must have been a tremendous trial for him to 
bear, day after day, with dull, stupid, wooden-head- 
ed men, even those that were nearest to him and 
whom he loved the best. He could not get anything 
out of them; up to the last they could not under- 
stand him. It took the revelation of the Spirit, aft- 
er he had gone to his Father, to bring them to their 
senses. He had to bear that thing day after day, 
night after night, with infinite patience and gentle- 
ness, even thanking God that he had such men as 
these to impart himself and his life to, and going 
on steadily, the world against him, his best friends 
not understanding him, and his best hope for him- 
self that he was coming nearer to his end. Power? 
There never was such a power of endurance in all 
humanity anywhere in history, and it takes a divine 
power for that. Your impatience with the world's 
fret and worry ; your disinclination to submit your- 



The Life and Mind of Paul 171 

self to the hard conditions and the ungenial associa- 
tions of life; your unwillingness to come down to 
the level of the stupidity of men, and their inability 
to see what is most clear and plain to you; your 
fretfulness when those things come out before you 
— all these things are just so many admonitions to 
you. They tell you that you need a greater power 
than you have ever known to save you from swamp- 
ing your own soul in your irritability and impa- 
tience ; and Paul makes that prayer for you here. If 
you know God, you will know that he is going to 
take you through some such course of life as this. If 
you know his will, if you are filled with the knowl- 
edge of his will, you know that some day or other 
you are going to find your Gethsemane. No, you 
will get beyond it; you will come to your cross. 
And you will plod along heavily, day after day, with 
your cross upon your shoulders and men adding to 
the burdens continually. Are you going to stand it ? 
How? Ah! unless the Everlasting Arm is under- 
neath and around you, unless you are strengthened 
with all power according to the might of his glory, 
there is no hope, you can make nothing out of it, and 
you will go fretting down to your grave. God may 
have mercy upon you in the last minute and lift the 
veil and let you see where you have done wrong 
and give you a sort of deathbed repentance, but 
that is the only hope. That is not the Christian life. 
With such furniture and such provision as this, the 



172 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

man must go on his way with never a murmur, nev- 
er a complaint, and never an outcry against God, 
and never a longing for better conditions, never a 
demand to be released from the thorn in the flesh, 
with the prayer, "Thy will be done, not mine." 
Without this the angels had not come and strength- 
ened him; without it he would have been alone in 
that tremendous hour. And we, with our little- 
ness and our weakness, can never go through these 
things unless we are strengthened by the might of 
his glory. "We can do all things through Christ 
which strengtheneth us." 

I cannot do with prayers like this anything like 
complete work. It must be only a hint, a sugges- 
tion. But there is one thing more I wish to touch, 
and that is thanksgiving. Go through it all. Take 
the awe-inspiring knowledge, the awful sounding of 
the abyss of the divine nature; take of it until you 
feel oppressed and overwhelmed by it. Let it rule 
your life and inspire it until you have done every 
good work that is within your reach and your pow- 
er, and let it impel you to higher effort until you 
can look God in the face and say: "I know thee, 
who thou art; the secret name has been whispered 
to me." Add to it patience and long-suffering, with 
not simply resignation but joyfulness, and then it 
is all to be crowned with what to Paul is the very 
flower of Christian experience, its consummate re- 
sult — thanksgiving. He seems to regard the atti- 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 173 

tude of the man toward God in sincere and thorough 
gratitude as the only befitting one and as the attitude 
that best fulfills God's purpose for the man. He 
wants love; he wants gratitude; he wants thanks- 
giving. When Paul is showing the effect of the 
gift to the poor of Jerusalem from the Churches, it 
is not that this is a supply for their need that is best 
and highest with him. That is true: it is a supply 
for the need of the people. But more than that: 
it redounds in thanksgiving to God. I think that is 
another thing that neither Paul nor his Lord would 
condone — ingratitude. The Master never stayed 
his hand because of ingratitude, but he always had 
in view stirring within the heart of man all the 
thankfulness that is due; it is a due to God. We 
cannot do much when we have done our best. A 
gift to God has little worth to him that hath cattle 
upon a thousand hills; the wealth of the world is 
his, and the glory of the stars dims beside the ra- 
diance of his person, and the splendors of the heav- 
enly life itself grow pale in his presence. We can- 
not do much for such as he, but we can do the one 
thing that he wants. "My son, give me thy heart 
in thankfulness, in affection, giving thanks [he puts 
in that word there; it is frequent with Paul, ly- 
ing at the heart of all his experience] to the Father." 
If you have such a Father as that, most certainly the 
well of gratitude ought never to dry up. "The Fa- 
ther who hath made us meet [through this process 



174 The Life and Mind of Paul. 

of knowledge and activity and patience, under the 
inspiration and direction of the Spirit of God] to be 
partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light." 
What a magnificent concatenation of terms! The 
inheritance comes to us that way — of the saints, 
the saintly ones, God's holy ones. That means the 
very best in God's universe. You will never get a 
higher order of being than the saints, and they have 
all the right and title to everything that God has. It 
has been written and signed and sealed with the 
blood of the Son of God, and he has sent it to us in 
ringing tones, proclaimed it to the world: "All 
things are yours." He has made us meet to be par- 
takers of their inheritance. You never think it of 
yourself; you cannot crave that saintliness. That is 
not your line at all; you doubt it; you are afraid of 
it. But, after all, it is the sweetest, purest kind of 
life; and it is the loftiest life; it is the strongest 
life; it is the thing that conquers death, the only 
thing that cannot be holden of death; and it is the 
thing that gives us the title to the inheritance incor- 
ruptible and undefiled. It is the inheritance of the 
saints when they come into the light. They are 
now in the dimness and obscurity and darkness; 
but when they get into their true place in light, and 
see things as God sees them and as they cannot be 
seen now, and find themselves among them, with all 
the glory of that life about them and ministering to 
them, then they will know what thanksgiving is due. 



The Life and Mind of Paul. 175 

And that is what the prayer is for: that you may 
realize something of that and be thankful for it — 
just humbly thankful. Shall Paul pray in vain for 
men? Shall the Church of to-day, after nearly two 
thousand years of such experience and of such work- 
ing, fall below the level of his prayers and not even 
seek to attain to the result of them? Shall we who 
call upon his name and think ourselves of the higher 
order of creation, standing at the very top and apex 
of this whole structure of humanity — shall we let 
our Bibles and our faith go and keep God at a dis- 
tance and say, "I desire no more knowledge of thee 
or thy ways; I know enough of thee?" Is that the 
way we are going to take God's plan, Paul's prayers, 
Christ's intercession, the cross? God forbid! 

My prayer for you is just a repetition of the apos- 
tolic petition that ye may be filled with the knowl- 
edge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and under- 
standing ; that ye may walk worthy of the Lord unto 
all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work and 
increasing unto the knowledge of God ; that ye may 
be strengthened with power according to the might 
of his glory, unto all patience and long-suffering, 
with joyfulness; that ye may be able to give thanks, 
as ye ought, to him who hath made you meet, by 
these processes and by the gift of his own Son, and 
by the power of his Spirit, to be partakers of the 
best heritage that ever was alloted to God's crea- 
tures — the inheritance of the saints in light. 



JAN 5 1913 



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